[spectramax]

I've always wondered: what is the incentive for colleges to put courses up for free? I remember more than 10 years ago when MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) started and at that time, I thought this is probably because MIT is well funded and they can afford to put content up for free. Now we are here, 10 years later and there is an abundance of free college courses - what are the incentives for colleges to do this?

[logicx24]

Building name recognition and improving their brand. I think in the last ten years, colleges have seen that MOOCS don't reduce the demand for the traditional college experience, and have realized that creating their own MOOCS is actually an effective to create a new pipeline of potential students.

[BucketSort]

My bet is to reduce the competition from other MOOC offering sites. If colleges didn't offer MOOC's, then that model would stand in stark contrast to the traditional educational model. And when MOOCs showed to be effective and gained popularity, it would put the authoritative hold universities have on education into question. Now that they are leading the way in MOOC's, they can curb that authority building and reduce the dramatic contrast which makes their model seem absurdly anachronistic.

[jaabe]

Are they doing it for free though? To me it seem like they may be building for the future of learning, and getting paid at least something (certificates) to do it.

I work as an external examiner for CS students in Denmark, and I’ve seen nothing here that rivals the automated grading systems applied by Harvard and MIT on places like EDX. Harvard even build an entirely cloud based IDE to get students easy access to development environment from a browser during introduction courses.

I took a few of those courses to see what they are like, and the truth is, the MIT intro courses to computation are actually a lot better than the CS intro courses I took at Aalborg University two decades ago. Sure it’s been two decades, and I didn’t need to learn anything for the first time. The course content was roughly the same as it was back then though, it’s just explained so much better by the MIT lecturers and their automattic finger exercises.

Right now that’s not a threat to universities who aren’t doing this, because a degree is worth something and a few certificates are worth very little. But if that changes, then I see trouble on the horizon for universities that didn’t prepare for a world where they might have to compete online. On top of that, there is incentive for the individual professors, in at least one of the courses I went through, the accompanying book was authored by the professor who taught the course.

I guess there is a high probability that things won’t change of course. Too many MOOC are extremely poor quality, some sites like Udemy even consists entirely of amateurs, and it’s too easy to cheat. But if things do move toward universities teaching online, then we wouldn’t really need thousands of places to teach introduction to CS, would we?

[daniel-s]

Nobody cares about the coursework at uni and what you learn. They're selling the accreditation (piece of paper). That's where the value is and they're not giving that away.

[Endy]

Primarily advertising and positioning themselves as merit-worthy schools in a specific field. It also gives the schools a way to sell more materials. Plus, it's a way that professors under the harsh 'publish or perish' regime can constantly publish visible content and keep their name out there. Beyond that, most people who take a free MOOC actually want the certification it leads to - and they're more likely to enroll at a school they've already become familiar with.

[anbop]

It’s usually more fruitful to look for individual incentives rather than organizational motives. The individual incentives are clear — the professor gets publicity and name recognition, the administrator gets to inflate their staff and budget, and the trustees who approve the (small) budget get to brand themselves as generous and community-minded.

[bjelkeman-again]

Marketing? Or maybe they actually take their mission seriously, to educate people, and see free courses as a way to achieve that.

[raz32dust]

Well, most of the courses listed are VC$, meaning they are free, but you can pay for certification. I am guessing universities and Coursera are just placing experimental bets on this pay-for-certification model for casual learners, in the hopes that it might eventually make some money (I hope it does!).

[r_singh]

It's not just the college per say that invests time and money to put courses up for free, it's after all the professors who choose to do so, and they definitely have incentives (well deserved) for the same.

[vnorilo]

Building name recognition and attracting students, I'd say.

[anonymous5133]

I'm assuming you've never taken a MOOC before? Most of them are no way even close to equivalent to the real class. Most of these universities basically use these as marketing. They'll teach you the first 4 weeks of material from a 16 week course. Most of them completely lack any form of assessment tools so students can't even practice.