The last paragraph seems particularly noteworthy:

On whether he's taken a MOOC class: "I've never made it through a complete MOOC," Thrun confessed. Much as books have been shrunk down to the size of 140 character tweets, Thrun says he expects that we'll continue to compress education. "I believe that 50 years from now, education will be as short and sweet as Twitter is today. It will be like an evening talk. And that will be a fantastic moment."

Could this be a solution to the engagement problem in education that pkrein recently discussed:

http://rein.pk/online-educations-dirty-secret-awful-retentio...