The Digital Skeptic: Online Education Fails Economics

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Turns out the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, Alabama Crimson Tide, Florida Gators and all the other jocks jockeying for a piece of the NCAA men's Bowl Championship Series action ain't the big men on campus anymore.

No, in this nutty digital age, the red-hot online thing is no longer college athletics, but old-school, throwback university classes with a Web-age twist: They're free.

"The course is working out better than I dreamed," Michael J. Cima told me in an email. Cima, the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering at MIT, teaches a free, online version of one of his chemistry courses at the school.

"We started with 27,000 registered and it has settled down to 5,000 active students," he said -- about 10 times the number of students he usually teaches in person.

Cima is not the only super geek rocking the quad with free online higher ed. MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative, which offers vast swaths of the MIT catalog for free, claimed an impressive 2 million visits in November 2011, up roughly 9% from the previous year.

A-list universities are in turn competing with a wave of similar, no-cost higher-ed sites. Big names include the Khan Academy, Academic Earth, Open Culture and what is emerging as the Instagram of free online higher ed, Mountain View, Calif.-based Coursera.

Launched this year by two Stanford University computer science profs, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, Coursera sits at the top of the Web content class. The BBC, The Chronicle of Higher Education and The New York Times, to name just a few, have reported on the definite smell of money at Coursera. No less than John Doerr, a partner at the top-shelf Silicon Valley venture capital shop Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is a founder. Doerr is the made new-media man behind Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOG), Intuit (INTU) and many others.

Like other hip, free Web brands, the service has passionate advocates. "Coursera is the change I have been waiting for in online higher education for 10 years," a Columbia University grad named Regina Saphier, who blogs about the service, told me in an email.

And based on my experience of signing up for a way-wonky data science class, Coursera definitely has Web game.

So where's the investor bummer? That's sadly far too easy. Just spend one minute studying how the money actually flows into Coursera and it's way clear this business will graduate to become the next Netflix (NFLX), Facebook (FB) or Twitter.

That is, yet another digital brand struggling to make its next dime.

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