Yes and no. Yes, someone was paid a modest salary to put together these course materials. They were not free to create. In a university setting with just a few

Yes and no. Yes, someone was paid a modest salary to put together these course materials. They were not free to create. In a university setting with just a few students per teacher and layers upon layers of supporting infrastructure, these courses are expensive to deliver. Possibly even more expensive than the objective worth of the material to the students. No. We are on HN, where "does it scale?" is gospel. MOOCs scale wonderfully. Millions of people could learn Calculus or Accounting from the modest effort of a single talented teacher. With that level of scale you do not necessarily need to charge every person who takes the class and free can be a business model. We can't lock our basic professional knowledge up behind a paywall that only the rich can penetrate. In fact this is the perfect thing to spend tax dollars on, a public good with a massive potential ROI. There's a reason the govt still pays for libraries. And before my optimism gets skewered, yes MOOCs don't seem to work for everyone, but surely they suit some people's learning styles better than textbooks which is really their only low-cost competition for most knowledge domains.