In the business analysis of Coursera INC I have mentioned on the five forces analysis section that Direct MOOC offers from Universities are a substitution risk for Coursera.
After successfully completing a Game Theory course offered by Stanford on Coursera, I was contacted recently for a follow up on their own platform “Stanford Online”:
Game Theory II
Matthew Jackson, Kevin Leyton-Brown, and Yoav Shoham
Starting May 27
The course is a follow-on to our introductory course and it covers how to design interactions between agents in order to achieve good social outcomes. The course — which is free and open to the public — considers three main topics: social choice theory (i.e., collective decision making), mechanism design, and auctions. The course will run for four weeks.
the fact is a functional MOOC platform is technological challenge and as the cours stands to start today all one can get from the site is an empty page with an Over Quota Error from google (the platform hosting the course app) saying “this application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.”
While it was predictable that direct MOOC offers from Universities will arrive, it looks like Coursera still has a technological edge. As a disruptive technology MOOC will probably stir numerous and varied reactions from providers of higher education services. Wat survival model will each actor select remains to be seen as he challenge has just begun …