On March 12, I attended TEDxBayArea, hosted by Tatyana Kanzaveli. The invited speaker was Eren Bali, CEO and co-founder of Udemy, a startup that aims to democratize education by supplying a platform that enables anyone to teach and learn online. “Students” vote with their attention and wallets, providing feedback on which instructors, formats and content have the most value.

Post-session, I found myself noodling on a few questions:

1. How might instructors develop online classes that satisfy learning styles that differ from their own bias?
2. How might brick-and-mortar institutions (educational, government and corporate) learn from online engagement metrics to inform decisions on best topics, instructors and curriculum designs?
3. As more people learn new subject matter using Massive Open Online Classes (MOOCs), how will businesses evolve to evaluate true mastery of the topic? Will degrees become less important?