[blagie]

It's worth noting "the founders" were mostly figureheads who took over from the actual founders through power plays, and knew nearly nothing about online learning, or much of anything other than corporate politics.

The original founders built platforms which worked pretty well. In the end, MOOCs were videos and multiple choice questions. No one can stomach that.

The original Stanford AI course, from Norvig/Thrun, did pretty okay. Coursera steamrolled Udacity by building a massive number of crappy courses.

The first edX course, 6.002x, mis-attributed to Agarwal but mostly built by Sussman/Mitros/Terman, did even better. Within a few years, edX was run by corporate types who did massive numbers of crappy courses.

The actual founders had bold plans for how to make the platforms and courses even better, but those never panned out, due to politics, incentives, etc.

Good online can be really good.