[softwaregravy]

Actually, I don't see this as out of line or inconsistent at all. Providing free education classes, particularly the introduction levels, increases awareness, acclimatizes students to learning online, and they learn how to do it. (They being Stanford. They work out hiccups over servers, videos, tests, whatever in the free courses.)

If Stanford then offered the next level of AI class online, but charged $1K? $3K for it, they'd get all their money back. Could turn into a classic Freemium model.

On the upside, this would probably be better for students as a whole, because most of them have no idea what they're really interested in. The ability to take all the intro classes for free and then pay for the ones that are more interesting to them is pretty interesting, from a macro-societal point of view.