Shen stressed that the problem with the old MOOC model is a focus on video libraries for teaching. She said the strength of the nanodegree program is that students are required to complete projects. “We care about completion rates, projects student build, and ultimately career readiness,” she said. “MOOCs have been too content-only focused and not a model that engages our students deeply. They are an improvement on pure content libraries when done well, but as a product not what we felt achieved success for our students and industry partners.”
Asked whether the company might phase out free courses, she said that the company’s latest programs continue to include free versions. “There is no change there,” she added.
Dhawal Shah, co-founder of Class Central, which tracks MOOCs, says that “it’s plausible” that the company would move away from making new courses free at some point. “Free courses are a marketing channel to feed learners into the paid programs,” he said in an e-mail interview. “But Udacity is able to generate huge amounts of press at a regular basis by launching nanodegrees like the Self-Driving Car Nanodegree or the recently announced Flying Car nanodegree. So the free courses might not provide the same returns as they did early on.”
Shah argues that Udacity and other providers of large-scale online course have gradually created more and more paid services, and made it harder for students to find their free offerings.