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ONline learning dian schaffhauser
How MOOCs Make Money
Dhawal Shah, founder of Class Central, has been tracking the machinations of the MOOC business since before it was a business. Here, he provides perspective on the revenue side of open and online courses.
IN 2011, when a few Stanford (CA) profes- sors experimented with delivering three of the university’s most popular computer science courses online for free, Dhawal Shah signed up for “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.” The idea of Stanford opening up its top-caliber edu- cation to people who lacked access appealed to Shah. And besides, he needed a boost to get him through the technical interviews that might result in a job in Northern California, where he wanted to land. He’d already earned a bache- lor’s in electronics and telecommunications from Mumbai University (India) and a master’s at Georgia Tech in computer science, enabling him to pick up work in Texas as a software developer. But to a young, ambitious program- mer, Dallas wasn’t Silicon Valley.
Shah noticed that at the same time he was working to keep up with the AI course, taught through videos and live quizzes by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, additional free online courses were popping up — mostly from Stan- ford, but also some from other esteemed institutions. All of them had their own home pages, which made it hard to keep track of what was available. Since Shah knew he wanted to take additional courses, during an energetic weekend, he put together a one- page website to keep track of all of them. His hope was that the project would give him
something to show off to future employers. His plan certainly worked, but not in the way he expected. Shah eventually did land that job in the Bay area, but it lasted just over a year. In the meantime, that one-page site eventually grew into what is now known
worldwide as Class Central.
“I happened to be at the right place at the
right time,” he said, noting that at that time, Udacity and Coursera weren’t officially called either of those names. No one used the term “MOOC.” That would join the popular vernac- ular a few months later.
Since then, Shah has taken perhaps another nine or 10 MOOCs. But more importantly, his site has made it possible for people all over the world to find their own online courses. Class Central has become the one-stop shop for hunting down every MOOC available to help people decide which online courses to take. Out of roughly 1.8 billion websites in the world, the site was recently ranked glob- ally within the top 18,000 by Alexa. In the United States it came in at 13,322; in India it was part of the top 6,000.
On top of that, through the site’s “MOOC Report,” Shah and his team of reporters have kept track of the evolution of MOOCs as they’ve grown into money-making machines. According to his tracking of public sources,
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | March/April 2019