I think asking money for certificates of completion is disingenious, as is charging for textbooks.

It says in the article that the founders see education as a right, that means it should be absolutely free. 'exploit-the-students' kind of money can be an arbitrarily low amount, depending on the circumstances of the students, who could be in fugitive camps in somalia for all anyone knows.

Instead, the obvious way to make money is to make it where the money is, the industry. This is how student organisations in The Netherlands make money, and I bet it's like that elsewhere too.

Why not sell information about what student has what capabilities, or even contact with the student in the form of job adverts or whatever? I can see that as a nearly unbounded source of revenue, and in the process hurting noone and helping everyone.

"... has begun to charge corporate employers, including Facebook and Twitter, for access to high-performing students, starting with those studying software engineering."

How about making money from textbooks?

I don't mean exploit-the-students kind of money, but still make money none the less. The teacher could sell the lecture notes++ as a printed book for 5$ per 100 pages.

A small textbook could cost 15$.

Imagine yourself taking the course -- I mean //really// taking it: spending lots of time watching the lectures, doing the exercises and trying to get into the subject.

If you want to print out the lecture notes and slides for the course (think SELECT .pdf FROM /course/name | print | bind) it would cost you about 300 pages 5c/page = $15 to get this printed at a local copy shop + $5 for spiral binding.

For the same price, you get a perfect-bound soft-cover textbook delivered to your front door (an extra $5 for S/H).

I am telling you guys, this P-o-D stuff is crazy!

It mentions they're already making some money from the Amazon affiliate links to textbooks. For a lot of courses the material is not confined to one single textbook, but supplemented with other books, video materials and papers one has to get online.

I would pay for access to course notes that have guarunteed permanence. Because if I ever want to look up an algorithm I learned, and I remember "oh, I remember that from that one class," I typically look back through my course notes. It'd be awesome to have those notes permanently, without my having to write them up. I know for my school's intro sequence, we post the notes online, but each year the notes change a little, and, if the course is in progress, or just about to start, then only the notes for the course up to the point it's at are available.

I may be dumb, but why not try to charge for the courses upfront? You offer a preview for free and charge a small fee for the full course(15$ for example). Once the videos are recorded, the costs for coursera and the professor should be very low, and the number attendees of every class are in the thousands. Couldn't be profitable that way?

If 15$ is still too much for some(someone who already has access to a decent computer and broadband internet), they could create a system of grants. Most people wouldn't lie just for saving such a small quantity.

They could ask for donations at the end of the course. Set it at a reasonable level and people who could afford it would feel obligated to do so but it would still allow access for low-income users.

I suspect with the right message they could get very high conversion rate.

I remember a time where "donation" wasn't a synonym to "pay for a job I did for free". The teachers offer their valuable time and knowledge, they shouldn't ask for "donation", they should ask for rightful pay for their time and the amount of value they create their students.

They do also get the recognition from teaching the class. Andrew Ng is now universally renowned as a machine learning expert (I imagine the consulting fees he could charge to businesses could be immense). Martin Odersky's excellent class on functional programming graduated 10,000 new Scala programmers, which can only help his company Typesafe.

Come to think of it though I actually would send a donation if a large portion of it went to the professor, although 'to advance the field' and 'because it's my passion' as reasons for teaching do make for better classes.

Your points are of course valid. I was just saying there are many things one can offer the teacher, and donations shouldn't be one of them.

>Andrew Ng is now universally renowned as a machine learning expert

I don't doubt that this has helped his profile with non-ML people - who might be in business positions to hire him as a consultant - but he was renowned as a machine learning expert before this.

But, as the article alludes to, a key part of the attraction of these courses is providing super low barriers to entry and access to those who couldn't otherwise pay.

Asking for donations solves this problem in a simple, frictionless way and may even be more effective than upfront payment. I think you're irrationally opposed on moral and ideological grounds rather than effectiveness, which is ultimately what matters.

You might be right about my moral and ideological grounds, but who are you to say effectiveness is what matters?

Effectiveness without morality and ideology is just Sociopathism. To quote an old saying "The trains always ran on time during the Nazi regime".