courseware provider, which Mike Caulfield (2013) had suggested was the intention all along.
In the meantime Sebastian Thrun announced that Udacity were close to finding the ‘magic formula’ for education (Carr 2013). Then in an interview in November 2013, driven by the completion rates outlined above, he announced that Udacity had a ‘lousy product’ and they were repositioning themselves to provide corporate training (Chafkin 2013). Such a pivot drew a considerable degree of comment and derision given the bold claims Thrun had made previously, with Siemens (2013) perhaps summing it up most succinctly: ‘Make no mistake – this is a failure of Udacity and Sebastian Thrun. This is not a failure of open education, learning at scale, online learning, or MOOCs. Thrun tied his fate too early to VC funding. As a result, Udacity is now driven by revenue pursuits, not innovation.’
It is Siemens’s last point that is worth pursuing in the context of MOOCs – the influence of venture capital funding. We should not be surprised that Coursera have attempted a range of business models, such an approach is not unusual with internet start-ups. It does suggest, however, that they are not entirely sure what the role of MOOCs is. Koller (2012) has promoted the democratisation of learning that MOOCs and Coursera offer as a social good, and their figures are impressive, with over 17 million enrolments by September 2013 (Coursera 2013c) – although this number should be treated with caution regarding what constitutes an enrolment, as mentioned previously. For comparison, there are only 2,300,000 students in higher education in the whole of the UK (HESA 2013). It might seem churlish therefore to criticise Coursera and other MOOC providers for providing access to free education. This section will not address issues such as pedagogy, which some have levelled as a criticism against MOOCs. While some of these
