King of Free Online Courses May Soon Add Videochats With Professors

Rick Levin Launch Squad

LAGUNA BEACH, California — Coursera is one of the driving forces behind the MOOC, the massive open online course, a way for enormous numbers of people to experience university courses over the internet. But the company may soon delve into something not so massive.

Rick Levin, the former president of Yale University who now serves as CEO of Coursera, says the Silicon Valley startup is exploring the possibility of offering intimate online discussions with university professors who teach its MOOCs. “Down the road, we’ll probably go to a premium layer that you could pay for that would give you live interaction with a professor by video or something like that—a seminar within a MOOC,” Levin told WIRED at the Wall Street Journal’s WSJD conference here in Southern California. He compares this to a Google Hangout with a professor, and he indicated that such a thing could arrive in the coming year.

Other outfits, such as 2U, offer more contained and intimate university classes over the net. But Coursera could expand the scope and reach of this kind of thing. The company is now running over 400,000 MOOCs through 128 universities, from Yale to the University of New Mexico, and the aim is to augment these massive courses with more direct discussions.

For Coursera, this is also a way of expanding its ability to make money. Today, all Coursera courses are free, and the company makes its money by charging users for certifications that show they’ve taken courses—certifications that it hopes will eventually be recognized by the world’s businesses as they hire workers. But Levin says that company will directly charge people to participate in its online video seminars with professors.

With its online certifications, Coursera can make money off of young students, and by charging for online seminars, Levin says, the company can also pull in dollars from an older portion of the worldwide population. “We think higher-touch interaction will appeal to some people,” Levin says. “It’s a way to get some money out of the lifelong-learner population, as opposed to the career builder.”