[vibrunazo]

I'm not sure I follow. Am I supposed to pay $10k for an online course that I know little about their reputation, with no free trial nor guarantee from existing businesses that they actually value your certification? It's hard to imagine how you'd get early adopters to get traction.

I think you're looking at it wrong. You shouldn't be comparing yourself to universities. Don't compare your prices, duration and accreditation with them. You should be building something completely different from the ground up. Something that is viable in today's world, not trying to bandage existing university models to today's world. Like pg said, build your own thing, if it's really good, it will eventually replace universities without you even aiming for that.

Personally, I think you should focus much more heavily on the accreditation side than anything else. Just try to build a certification system together with existing tech employers, something that they would sign and put a banner in your website saying "company X approves this certificate as important for our selection process". That would get early adopters interested. After you have that. Offer your classes for free, make those as widely available as possible. Charge for the certificate and one on one help with those who feel they need it to get your certificate. Well, that's how I think this universities will actually get disrupted.

[waterlesscloud]

I'd actually focus more on reputation for delivering results than accreditation. Accreditation is a massive bureaucratic nightmare and I'm not sure it's worth it. For access to Title IV, maybe, but it's going to seriously cost you in other ways, slowing you down on a 1000 fronts.

I don't think you can beat the current universities by playing the game by the rules they've set up to manage their competition. Just seems like you've lost before you've even started.

[padwiki]

We actually have to focus on results first and foremost. By the time we can even apply for accreditation (probably 3 years out) the issue of accreditation for reputation will be moot.

But, you have to look at what the larger impact can be with accreditation and Title IV. Even though we are strongly against student loans, being able to work with state and federal governments for grant and work study funds is the best and most direct way we have at hitting "free education for all" status. It's also the quickest way to move out of the relatively small group of students who don't care about accreditation to reach the much larger group that does. It's only by being a reasonable alternative to this group of students that we can apply real pressure to the current system. As long as we aren't accredited, the existing institutions can simply point to that fact and write us off and most people will listen to them.

[padwiki]

Well, the courses start at $200, we have a generous refund policy, and you can actually try the system and class out for free right now with a guest account. We don't even require a real email.

Also, we have thought very seriously about the business model of offering classes for free (Udacity model) and charging for certification/one on one. The numbers we see for that model just don't work, even at a large scale. You have to focus in introductory classes with the broadest possible appeal, reduce the difficulty of the course so you don't get 10,000 complaint emails from students who can't keep up, use a MOOC structure that is more about cost control than maximizing learning. Plus, the conversion from free to paid user may or may not be enough to cover the cost of course development. Our model, on the other hand, allows us to pay our professors quite generously for classes that may not have 100,000 students attending and focus more on building our catalog instead of just building the user base.