Algorithmically, these models are similar, except that CBOW predicts target words (e.g. 'mat') from source context words ('the cat sits on the'), while the skip-gram does the inverse and predicts source context-words from the target words. This inversion might seem like an arbitrary choice, but statistically it has the effect that CBOW smoothes over a lot of the distributional information (by treating an entire context as one observation)