If you’ve been paying attention to the MOOC debate over the last year or so, you may have seen that for all intents and purposes the debate is pretty much over. MOOCs are dead. Sebastian Thrun, the founder of Udacity, recently acknowledged that his company makes a “lousy product.” Soon after, Daphne Koller admitted that her company Coursera could in no way compete with the traditional, brick-and-mortar university which teaches through face-to-face interaction: “The best place to acquire [much deeper cognitive skills] is by coming and getting an education at the best universities.”
But UC Online has always been, well, a ways behind everybody else. From the beginning, the project was unable to raise the private capital needed to get off the ground. The head of the project, former UC Berkeley Law School Dean Chris Edley, infamously claimed that he “should be shot” if he wasn’t able to raise that money himself — he was only able to put together the paltry sum of $748,000 — but in the end he had to crawl back to the administration begging for an interest-free, $6.9 million loan.