By Henry Kronk, eLearning Inside
Udacity marks just one-way disrupters are profiting from online education using business models previously absent from the field. The company with the most registered users, Coursera, operates on a kind of graduated and diversified freemium model. You can try before you buy with Coursera, but to progress in their classes, students can pay a flat fee, get a bundled deal, or sign up for a subscription package. With enough credits, students can obtain accredited degrees. Though it has millions more users than Udacity, Coursera was just valued at $800 million in June. While MOOCs began as an initiative that would bring education to those who struggled to access it, the practice was soon swallowed up by-, or transformed into for-profit education. This is not an innovation of democracy, it’s capitalism.
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