The Council of UC Faculty Associations: An Open Letter to Daphne Koller, Co-Founder and Co-President of Coursera and Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University

" ... Because I share your vision of creating a world in which all have access to an excellent and empowering education, I would like to propose a new online course for you to make freely available through the Coursera platform. Its title is 'The Implications of Coursera’s For-Profit Business Model for Global Public Education.' The goal of the course will be for the students enrolled in it to understand the real relation between Coursera’s visionary mission—'to offer courses, in partnership with the worlds’ top universities, to everyone for free'—and the logic of the strategic business plan that led Coursera to be named 'The Best Startup of 2012' by TechCrunch last January. You and your company’s compelling pitch to consumers suggests that the private sector--that is, venture capitalists and not taxpayers--can deliver a more equal world in which income will be based on the skills and knowledge people actually acquire rather than the artificial scarcity of credentials for which they are eligible and can afford to pay. It is natural to hope that in this more equal, and also more productive, world incomes could rise for everyone willing to acquire the necessary academic knowledge and take the tests to prove it. This, in fact, was exactly what was promised by the original California Master Plan for Higher Education using taxpayers’ money when it was adopted in 1960. My proposed Coursera course will ask students to discover for themselves how and why John Doerr, and your other Venture Capitalists, are willing to provide an even greater abundance of knowledge in the service of greater economic and social equality than is the State of California, which clearly has the means to spend much more than it has cost your company to reach a worldwide enrollment in the millions. As the course progresses, my more diligent students will come to see, however, that reducing income gaps through education is not the main problem that Coursera and other Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) providers are trying to solve in their pitch to investors. That problem is, rather, how and when to price the content that you are now giving away in your current (pre-public offering) phase of development ... A true educational Commons would be a force for reducing academic hierarchy and income inequality. I'm all in favor of that. You say you are too. But is that what you are telling your partners in finance and university administration? Or are you telling them that they can accumulate even more of what they already have—money and prestige—while appearing to be giving it away? I will know my course has been successful when my students understand Coursera’s business model behind offering free higher education globally (along with the promise of greater social equality) as an exciting venture capital investment opportunity through which to increase privately-held wealth and lock in existing educational hierarchies."