Prestigious growth at online higher education startup

New York Times : Coursera , a distributor of some 200 free massive open online courses (MOOCs) that began five months ago with the participation of Stanford and Princeton Universities, has enrolled 1.35 million students and secured the involvement of 33 universities. New partners include Brown and Columbia Universities, which will offer two engineering MOOCs, as well as “specialized institutions like the Mount Sinai School of Medicine; public research universities like the University of Florida; and more international schools like the University of Melbourne, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.” Coursera’s “students come from 196 countries, with about a third from the United States and the next largest contingents from Brazil and India.” Higher education leaders have expressed “concerns about giving away content with no revenue stream in sight.”