Consider the hypothesis above and consider the facts below

massive open online course= Mooc

but coursera is not Open

You cannot share Coursera content on Youtube or any non Coursera- this effectively ties in people to the website
The Website does not use any social login or OpenID
There is enough evidence of cross selling including branding, selling books and now 50$ certificates
There is more vigor to get easily monetization course curriculum than to get subjects that are relevant to society ( eg job training for laid off workers in rural USA or for farmers in Africa or for textile mill workers in Bangalidesh)
No effort in localization and customization or translation despite multiple avenues for machine learning enabled translation APIs (cough cough Machine learning= ML)
Prof ML insists on using Octave and not R. Everyone knows Sheldon Cooper is more cool than Howard Wolowitz, yet Prof ML will say – it is easy to prototype using the latter and not the former. Plus he does not really update his slides too much
With a 5% pass rate you actually dont care about the (students) education as they are just (money) bricks in your (fire) wall
Blog posts are shared but data on usage and engagement is not shared openly or through an API
Lame efforts at open sourcing the platform
Lamer efforts at keeping clutter off the course search page ( Hint- Dont use Ctrl + F)

All images sourced from http://boards.4chan.org/b/

Higher education in the West is no longer the exclusive club and proxy partner to student debt. This amazing article by NYTimes shows how- the following are shaking the football loving US education giants in their boots while bring balance back to the Force. Big Education for the common people because you need humans to code in the Big Data era.

https://www.coursera.org/ – The pioneer, has the advantages and disadvantages of being the market leader in an innovating. Sure 1.7 million users, but how many are attending how many lectures and how many newly skilled machine learning people are there after 2 courses have been completed by Andrew Ng, and does industry feel the same about the employ-ability of these course takers.

https://www.edx.org/ , and http://www.udacity.com/ – again some course are common across these platforms so more public web analytics would be a welcome step.

But I really liked Stanford’s open source solution, so that anyone especially and including corporations and companies can start creating their own online courses. It is called class2go and is available at https://github.com/Stanford-Online/class2go

Class2Go

Class2Go is Stanford’s internal open-source platform for on-line education. A team of eight built the first version over the summer 2012, and it is still under active development. Class2Go launched this Fall for six on-campus classes and two “massive open online courses” (MOOC’s): Computer Networking and Solar Cells, Fuel Cells, and Batteries.

Class2Go was built to be an open platform for learning and research. Professors have access to the classes’ data to learn how their students learn.

Leveraging Others

Projects that help class2go.com

YouTube for video
Khan Academy for their HTML-based exercise framework
Piazza for forums
MySQL is our database
The massive Python Django ecosystem: eg. South, Registration
Amazon AWS suite for hosting (EC2, S3, RDS, Route53, IAM)
Chef from Opscode for configuration management
Github for source code management and issues

Good to see technology and the internet bringing back skills to people globally, so in the future they wont have to use a skill shortage excuse to import cyber technology H1b slaves and coolies from Asia forced to choose between livelihood, family and undeniable economic arbitrage pressure. Maybe they can try and customize it for Africa, or for women or other needy areas as well.