Dive Brief:

• Writing for the Financial Times, Edward Luce says that tailoring MOOCs toward technical and vocational training — as Sebastian Thrun plans to do at Udacity — may be missing the mark as the U.S. sheds jobs in the information sector.
• Luce argues that creative endeavors are growth areas in the labor market, and precisely the ones that MOOCs are least suited to prepare students for.
• He argues that as promising as technology is, the best hope for matching education to the labor market comes down to the human factor.

Dive Insight:

Luce's argument hinges in large part on a study that he says has not received enough attention: A Harvard Business Review article that shows the number of computer-related jobs in this country falling by more than 100,000 since 2000, and telecommunications jobs falling by more than 500,000 in the same period.