Students Rush To Web Classes, But Profits May Be Much Later

More top colleges are offering free massive open online courses, but companies and universities still need to figure out a way to monetize them.

In August, four months after Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng started the online education company Coursera, its free college courses had drawn in a million users, a faster launching than either Facebook or Twitter. The co-founders, computer science professors at Stanford University, watched with amazement as enrollment passed two million last month, with 70,000 new students a week signing up for over 200 courses, including Human-Computer Interaction, Songwriting and Gamification, taught by faculty members at the company’s partners, 33 elite universities.

In less than a year, Coursera has attracted $22 million in venture capital and has created so much buzz that some universities sound a bit defensive about not leaping onto the bandwagon. Other approaches to online courses are emerging as well...All of this could well add up to the future of higher education — if anyone can figure out how to make money...