Source: WSJ

By MELISSA KORN And JENNIFER LEVITZ

Professor Jeremy Adelman has taught a world-history class at Princeton University for several years, but as he led about 60 students through 700 years of history on the ivy-covered campus this past fall, one thing was different: Another 89,000 students tuned into his lectures free of charge via Coursera, an online platform.

Those kinds of numbers, and their potential for remaking higher education, have generated plenty of excitement about massive open online courses—dubbed MOOCs. They’ve also lured venture investors and universities, who have put millions of dollars into companies like Udacity, Coursera and edX, which partner with schools or instructors to offer these courses.

Udacity employees work on programing the site at the company’s Palo Alto, Calif., office last April.

The most popular of these classes enroll hundreds of thousands of students globally, and while they’re taught by star instructors from top universities, they generally don’t carry credit that can be applied to a college degree.

While backers say the short, digestible lessons are nothing short of revolutionary, MOOC providers are still figuring out how to keep basic course access free while generating revenue.

Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford University professor and co-founder of Udacity, which launched in 2012 with a $21.5 million bankroll from such prominent backers as Andreessen Horowitz, says his fledgling industry is in “a state of experimentation.”

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At least some providers of MOOCs may decide that nonprofit status is the way to go, taking cues from Carnegie Mellon University’s decade-old Open Learning Initiative, which has nearly 45,000 students enrolled across its free and fee-based classes. While it relies mainly on grant funding and offers classes free to independent learners, it has begun charging $15 to $25 per student for the academic versions of some courses—used at schools such as University of California, Berkeley—to ensure the initiative could sustain itself.

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