MOOCs: the newest online dating service

Employers willing to pay can now find their soulmates with Coursera's new escort, er, on-line dating, no, headhunter service to find students who like poetry, museum-going, and long walks on the beach. Or soft skills in addition to their raw performance. (Okay, now it's starting to sound like Craigslist.)

Providers of free online courses are officially in the headhunting business, bringing in revenue by selling to employers information about high-performing students who might be a good fit for open jobs.... Both Coursera and Udacity show employers more than just student grades. They also highlight students who frequently help others in discussion forums. Mr. Thrun, of Udacity, said those "softer skills" are often more useful to employers than raw academic performance. 

To be serious for a moment, this is an excellent example of the Autonomia themes of "real subsumption" and the "social factory" (somewhat technical discussion here), that is, the incorporation of everyday social skills into capitalist production.

It used to be that you developed social skills outside the work place, and put them on sale with the rest of your skills when you went to work (that's "formal subsumption," which means there's still an outside to work). But now your development of social skills becomes part of work, it becomes something from which your employer can make a buck. Because make no mistake, you're at work when you're a student in an MOOC; each keystroke is being captured and is being used to create data profiles that can be sold, as here, and will most likely be used as well to create teaching software for sale. (Or so it seems to me, though I haven't found discussion of this yet; links would be most welcome, if the hivemind can be harnessed here in this decidedly non-profit blog!)