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Comment by pixelcort | Hacker News Reader

Wait, I'm confused. Isn't the whole point of free MOOCs is that their content is open source, freely modifiable by other teachers, or anyone?

Or was I just under a rock when MOOCs were being popularized?

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Hmm, not really. The current best-of-breed are taught by professors at big establishments, some of them basically mirror the university class they're currently teaching. They're usually videos too, so they're not exactly modifiable nope. They do tend to keep the content up after the classes though in my experience, so you could consider them open source.

-Coursera and Udacity: platform and courses are proprietary

-EdX and class2go: platform is open source, courses are not

These are leagues ahead of platforms I've seen which are completely modifiable in content.

Pretty much all [good] current MOOCs are free as in beer, but the content is not open source in any way.

They have (yet) to monetize, and they most likely will do so. I'd seriously expect that they won't stay free as in beer, but either paid (though orders of magnitude cheaper than 'classic' courses) or freemium. Coursera Signature track (verification & official certification/uni credits for some courses) already can be considered as a freemium experiment.

The way I understood this was to be that the courses are free and contain all the free 'open source' content needed for it; as they always have.

However, the addition being, they will offer parts of selected published textbooks for free which would help with the understanding of the course - but were not produced as part of it.

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