Right before Labor Day weekend I shared a ramen-noodle lunch with Jeff Maggioncalda, the new CEO of online education firm Coursera, who gave me an interesting reason for why he took the job. The founding CEO of the original robo-advisor Financial Engines, Maggioncalda says hed been midway through a mid-career semi-retirement when he read Tom Friedmans book Thank You for Being Late, which among other Friedmanesque very large thoughts stresses the importance of community and education as the savior of society. When a recruiter called about the top job at Coursera, a five-year-old startup and one of the original MOOC (massive open online course) companies, Maggioncalda saw an opportunity for meaning.

Coursera and its ilkUdacity and Minera Project are two examplesare an appropriate topic of conversation on the day after Americans honor those who work. Courseras take is that higher education is too expensive and too airy-fairy to meet the needs of todays students. Whats needed are specific classes that serve the needs of todays students, like courses on how to code specific software languages and brand-new fields like machine learning and data science. Coursera also is working with individual employers like Google (googl) to design classes that employees and developers need to succeed on their platforms.

Maggioncalda says Coursera isnt only interested in offering these trade-oriented classes, but he may not have had time yet to survey all his firms offerings. I asked if I could take an introductory course on French, and he assured me I could. If theres a French class offered at Coursera.org, I couldnt find it.

Coursera is a big idea with a ton of funding, $200 million in all. I have no idea how Coursera is doing because Maggioncalda wont say. (It is growing fast and is funded by luminaries like New Enterprise Associates and Kleiner Perkins, he points out; But fast is nearly meaningless, and the well-funded Juicero had impressive backers too, including Kleiner Perkins.)

Coursera sells access to groupings of courses it calls specializations, sold as a subscription for $49 a month. It also has created online degrees with prestigious universities, including a $20,000 MBA from the University of Illinois (my alma mater) that Maggioncalda says would cost $118,000 in person.

Companies like Coursera are great ideas that could fill a tremendous need. Whether or not they can become businesses is another matter.

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I admired this article by Noam Scheiber in The New York Times, also a good Labor Day read, about how the Trump Administration is acting on its reverence for entrepreneurs by making concrete regulatory changes. Note this articles dispassionate, analytical tone about an important subject. What you take away from it likely will depend on if you share the presidents high opinion of entrepreneurs.

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Finally, just for fun, I thought you might like this piece about a local bookstoreand a really good one I visit regularlythat has survived for 50 years.

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Coursera's Online MBAs Could Be Big Business - Fortune