[uulbiy]

I think the big mistake was offering something for free and then asking money for it. The first backlash was with the (unverified) certificates and the latest with the tests and assignments.

It might have been a different story if they announced from the beginning that they are only offering their services for free for a certain period of time. They focused on gaining users and they succeeded on that, but now that they are focused on making money they seem to lose users.

[gedrap]

I think it's just basic human psychology that once you have access to something, you start feeling entitled to it. However, in reality, Coursera (or any other company) is under no obligation to keep providing free stuff.

It's natural that you are losing users once you start asking for money, it's just impossible to have it otherwise. Let's not forget that Coursera is a business so they obviously need to generate some revenue, sooner or later. What they did seems like a sensible business decision to me. They focused and succeeded with the marketing and branding initially (Coursera became almost synonymous with online courses) and they are collecting the revenue from it now.

[TeMPOraL]

> I think it's just basic human psychology that once you have access to something, you start feeling entitled to it.

I don't think that's true. People don't seem to feel that entitled in the "analog" world. But the digital technology changes the equation, and frankly, I think our "lizard brain" is right on this one.

The marginal cost of producing another copy of digitally encoded product is essentially zero, and it requires zero specialist knowledge. Copying binary data is what computers are made for, it's their basic function. Plus, the Internet lets you scale a digital business to the whole world for (almost) free. Honestly, what feels entitled is expecting that one should be able to scale their business by orders of magnitude while retaining the price.

(And in general, charging for copying data feels a lot like charging for air, but that's another topic.)

But regardless, Coursera is really playing fast and loose with their credibility. It used to be that it was the place you could go to get a decent education on some topic for free, at any time and in your own pace. What it (and other sites like it) turned into is a money-making machine. You get forced to follow a particular schedule ("yadda yadda people can't learn if they're not forced"), the course materials are often available only during the particular time window and disappear as soon as the course ends, and now they're also employing a lot of dark patterns to make sure you can't even find the free courses. All that while talking how their mission is to bring accessible education to the world. Bullshit. They're just making money because media wrote a lot about them and made them look hot.

You know how real revolution in education looks like? It looks like this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11561770 - the original article + the comment thread + the links in that comment thread.

[gedrap]

>>> The marginal cost of producing another copy of digitally encoded product is essentially zero, and it requires zero specialist knowledge. Copying binary data is what computers are made for, it's their basic function. Plus, the Internet lets you scale a digital business to the whole world for (almost) free. Honestly, what feels entitled is expecting that one should be able to scale their business by orders of magnitude while retaining the price.

Well, it can be said about most of the SaaS companies but that's not how business works. If it doesn't cost you anything to produce, then you should give it away for free might look great at first sight but it's not that great in reality. So if the business is just giving away the product for free, why would someone pay for that? You might say extra features, etc. But they are free to distribute as well!

If we apply this to the physical products, you can equally say that the companies shouldn't charge more than it costs to produce something. But if all companies worked this way, that would take us back to the stone age pretty quickly.

Money motivates people, motivate people produce goods.

[TeMPOraL]

> If we apply this to the physical products, you can equally say that the companies shouldn't charge more than it costs to produce something. But if all companies worked this way, that would take us back to the stone age pretty quickly.

But that's what happens in the physical world in face of competition (and that's the "great promise of capitalism", btw.) - prices fall down to minimal sustainable level unless someone is able to erect some artificial structure that will inflate them (like enough layers of middlemen).

But anyway, I don't mind Coursera or others trying out any business model they want. But them talking about a "mission to ensure access to education to everyone", etc.? This is getting dishonest. I'm criticizing them for saying they're doing this for humanity, while in fact getting further and further away from this goal every day.

[HillaryBriss]

> prices fall down to minimal sustainable level unless someone is able to erect some artificial structure

In education, the artificial structure is often exclusivity in admissions. This also works for nightclubs.

[sokoloff]

"minimum sustainable level" and "absolute marginal cost" are two very different things, particularly in the digital contnt world.

[threesixandnine]

I do agree with you that we sometimes feel entitled to something and we shouldn't. However, I remember when Udacity started and it was all ah, yes, oh, uh, free courses, free education, access for everyone.

Charge for it but don't try and fool me with "I am nice and doing good" talk.

[TeMPOraL]

Yeah and especially Coursera is still waving the banner of "free education for everyone" (and asking to pay to support it...) while employing more and more dark patterns to prevent you from getting viewing the for free.

[jnbiche]

Meanwhile, Khan Academy, who really does believe in free education for everyone, is getting better and better...

[TeMPOraL]

It looks like they're slowly succumbing too :(. It took me over a minute now to figure out how to get to the videos without having to register first - their new site design makes it much harder than it was when Khan Academy was "just a site". I hope they won't go further in that direction.

[geomark]

Agree. They are running a business so can charge if/what they want. I just think they were a little clumsy how they made the transition. It was particularly annoying for people mid-way through a specialization to find out that the rest of the courses in the specialization would be crippled.

[erdojo]

Coursera built its PR engine on the premise of bringing high quality top-university education to the world for free. They gave keynotes to large audiences, did press tours, and even used a .org domain. Very feel-good, and they capitalized on the resulting publicity and good will to raise a lot of money.

No one would have whined much about add-ons for a cost. But to restrict what was originally part of the core free experience - the experience they built their reputation on - is why any backlash now is entirely of their own making.