[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.