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Frank Chen
Note: I am not speaking on behalf of Coursera or Stanford here. This is my personal opinion.
I honestly think Coursera would not have gotten off the ground if it were a non-profit. Building a platform like Coursera and maintaining it requires lots of people and resources, and the people and resources are incredibly hard to come by when you are a non-profit. For instance, just look at how many days of the year the Wikimedia Foundation needs to run huge intrusive banners on all its websites to raise funds -- and they run a really lean operation.
If Coursera were a non-profit, KPCB and NEA would never invest $16 million in us to get us off the ground -- after all, they are VCs accountable to their own investors. Furthermore, I don't think Stanford was willing to invest that much money in us with potentially no returns of any sort as the MOOC movement might well have been a flash in the pan.
Without venture capital funding, it will be almost impossible to hire any full-time software engineers and course operations specialists. You can only get undergraduates (like myself) and graduate students to be code monkeys on the cheap for so long -- after all, we have degrees to complete and other jobs to get to.
Sometimes people bring up edX as a counterpoint. "Why isn't Coursera/Udacity non-profit when edX is?" they say. To that, I note that edX only got off the ground because Harvard and MIT put in $60 million at its inception. Might Coursera have been non-profit if some benefactor had offered Andrew and Daphne that much money? Maybe, who knows.
As to the point of how Coursera could ever release courses in a non-annoying way -- aren't we doing exactly that right now?
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Note: I am not speaking on behalf of Coursera or Stanford here. This is my personal opinion.
I honestly think Coursera would not have gotten off the ground if it were a non-profit. Building a platform like Coursera and maintaining it requires lots of people and resources, and the people and resources are incredibly hard to come by when you are a non-profit. For instance, just look at how many days of the year the Wikimedia Foundation needs to run huge intrusive banners on all its websites to raise funds -- and they run a really lean operation.
If Coursera were a non-profit, KPCB and NEA would never invest $16 million in us to get us off the ground -- after all, they are VCs accountable to their own investors. Furthermore, I don't think Stanford was willing to invest that much money in us with potentially no returns of any sort as the MOOC movement might well have been a flash in the pan.
Without venture capital funding, it will be almost impossible to hire any full-time software engineers and course operations specialists. You can only get undergraduates (like myself) and graduate students to be code monkeys on the cheap for so long -- after all, we have degrees to complete and other jobs to get to.
Sometimes people bring up edX as a counterpoint. "Why isn't Coursera/Udacity non-profit when edX is?" they say. To that, I note that edX only got off the ground because Harvard and MIT put in $60 million at its inception. Might Coursera have been non-profit if some benefactor had offered Andrew and Daphne that much money? Maybe, who knows.
As to the point of how Coursera could ever release courses in a non-annoying way -- aren't we doing exactly that right now?
See Questions On Quora
Continue reading...
