<p>EdX (backed by Harvard and MIT) vs. Coursera (backed by Stanford, Princeton, Berkeley, UPenn, and UMichigan), which will become the premier provider of free high-quality courses online?</p>
<p>There are major differences between the two providers:</p>
<p>EdX is a non-profit joint-venture founded by MIT and Harvard with $60M in startup-funding. It has a pipeline of 2,100 OCW courses from MIT already online that will be progressively converted to the new platform. There should be few copyright issues with courses owned by either university.</p>
<p>Coursera is a for profit-venture funded company with $16M in venture capital. There is no existing pipeline of courses available. Most of the course material still needs to be assembled and rights acquired from the respective participants. A major issue will be under what conditions professors who own the teaching materials (as opposed to the universities where they teach) will be willing to give them to a for profit entity without any revenue sharing. </p>
<p>It remains to be seen if such ventures can be self-sustaining and profitable enough to attract extensive private capital or if they will need to depend on the contributions from well endowed universities. Prior commercial efforts were all failures. Columbia University introduced Fathom, a 2001 commercial venture that involved the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan and others. It lost money and folded in 2003. Yale, Princeton and Stanford collaborated on AllLearn, a nonprofit effort that collapsed in 2006.</p>