[garysieling]

I've been trying to build out a site of free standalone lectures (https://www.findlectures.com), and it's become clearer as I've been building a collection of content how different the motivations behind free material is from paid.

If a university / professor / hiring manager is behind the free content, they're promoting their brand, so they need really compelling material to stand out from everyone else.

[king_magic]

Yeah, I've definitely felt hints of the course author's motivations behind the various classes I've taken. For me, though, the quality of the free material is a pretty significant measure of paid material - if a site like Udacity can't put out well constructed material, I'm just not going to give them my money to find out if their paid material is much better.