The disruption started a long time ago, with Wikipedia and MIT Open Courseware.  By now, the amount of online learning materials that has accumulated on the internet over the years has become staggering.  Equally impressive is the number of people that spend their time answering questions on forums, mailing lists, Stack Exchange sites, or Quora.  Today, there’s nary a technical subject that cannot be learned by a committed, resourceful individual.

And therein lies a problem.  Learning is a difficult process, and it is, for most people, a social process.  By providing video-recorded lectures and a stack of problem sets, we are giving thousands of people access to knowledge they would have had trouble acquiring otherwise.  But we are missing hundreds of thousands or even millions others, who would like to learn, but need extra help, or extra motivation, or a more structured environment.

We need to build a community of instructors and students passionate about teaching and learning in the new online landscape.  This work is already well under way.  Sal Khan and the founders of KnowLabs are some of the people reshaping the world of online education, and I fully believe that they will succeed.

In the frenzy of chasing after Google and Facebook, we often forget that the Web has always been a knowledge delivery engine.  Let’s change this.