But currently we overestimate how much people should value brand name in education, and there's every reason to think that will change.

True. And because of this I think at this stage it's impossible to say which one will become huge. They're all lacking two extremely core components: credibility and any sort of structured curriculum.

Credibility: What employer understands the value of Udemy or Coursera courses? Essentially none. And understandably so.

Structured curriculum: No high school student today will spend on their own time, instead of going to university, 1-4 intense years of Udemy or Coursera courses. A very large majority of high school students haven't the slightest clue what they want to spend their life doing. Without any clue, there is no way they will have sufficient drive on their own to lead their own education efforts.

I haven't seen anything from either of these websites that even come remotely close to solving these issues.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. This big educational startup land grab is futile until someone can address these two problems meaningfully. The first one isn't going to come down on its own in less than a couple generations--we're talking 20-40 years.

Whoever solves these problems first stands to reap the biggest rewards.

Why do you think that will change? Assuming more and more people become well educated thanks to Coursera and company, I only see the value of brand name education going up.

Probably because "education" is not such a "fixed" thing anymore, and University courses are still very fixed, compared to the wealth of knowledge you could get from "experts" in a huge array of topics.

yeah this,

if your not getting credit, what does the name brand mean?

some people may get a kick out of taking a 'Stanford' class (myself included, I took the original AI class)

those people will get discouraged quick if they go through the whole class and don't have a good outlet for that knowledge

I see two potential outlets, 1 something to put on your resume that will get you a job,

or 2, specific knowledge that will let you complete cool, even marketable project independent of a resume line

1 is a tricky proposition for these classes, until if figures that out, whoever figures 2 out will be the winner

I went all the way through the AI class, even got over 90%, I felt like I understood a decent amount of theory, still a ways from actually being able to go out and complete a project on my own