I didn’t realize the business model online educators like Udacity were considering:
And Mr. Thrun’s new company, Udacity, which is supported by Charles River Ventures, plans to, essentially, monetize its students’ skills — and help them get jobs — by getting their permission to sell leads to recruiters.
“We’re going to have detailed records on thousands of students who have learned these skills, many of whom will want to make those skills available to employers,” said Mr. Evans, the Virginia professor. “So if a recruiter is looking for the hundred best people in some geographic area that know about machine learning, that’s something we could provide, for a fee. I think it’s the cusp of a revolution.”
Heck, they are already talking about optioning out future income as payment for present debt, so why not this?
If one believes this model of selling student data (in particular: skills/quality estimates) will be somehow restricted to “online educators”, one will be surprised to find out when it is not. Student data of this sort is already widely and frequently shared, albeit informally.
Universities, as would any other starving organism, will seek to commoditize this data as soon as practically possible. Best they gobble down this meal before the government-funded meal truck drives off: JP Morgan has already pulled support for any kind of student loans back to “existing customers only”. Not going to be too long before the cracks in brick-and-mortar universities appear.