[glesica]

But if your customers don't understand the product then all bets are off and you have a moral (and, frankly, self-serving) responsibility to explain the product to them.

The way it sounds to me, SJSU and Udacity and are going to take the time to study the data and figure out why it is that so many students failed. If, and this seems pretty likely to me, it turns out that the students were confused about the product (the courses) then I would imagine that steps will be taken to clarify things so that people can make choices that will lead to the best-possible outcomes.

Many price points, many products doesn't work if people don't understand the products.

[trevelyan]

In the education market, customers do not know what they are purchasing by definition. This is why there is so much crap in the industry -- companies have an incentive to spend money on marketing rather than content.

The latest round of MOOCs are not really monetizing educational content (which is and has been online elsewhere, often for free). They are packaging institutional prestige, the same dynamic Facebook used to drive student adoption. Khan Academy is the exception.

[bayesianhorse]

A lot of the material on coursera isn't that easily available for free. The courses usually take a new and integrated aproach that you would see in a university course, created and presented by an expert instructor. I don't care for their prestige, but probably coursera is using the instutional prestige as a selection criterion, and it works, mostly.

I also think Udacity is more in between Khan Academy and Coursera, in that Udacity tries to find new ways of online instruction.