Financing and Development of MOOCs

For a university which decides to replace its conventional teaching units with MOOCs, the financial return is not clear. The use of MOOCs in the flipped‐classroom methodology requires a huge amount of human resources. In the cost of a MOOC, the initial investment, which is always relatively high, is between $50,000 and $200,000, not including "operating expenditure" (OPEX). In the OPEX, a distinction must be drawn between personnel costs for the university and the organization of recruitment of tutors, which is an additional expense. Apart from the occasional exception, all the organizations which professionally develop MOOCs have chosen a private business structure. They use private capital, possibly supplemented by funds from the universities and foundations. By mid‐2013, Coursera, which is a commercial enterprise, had raised $85 million from diverse venture‐capital structures or parties interested in an innovative area, such as the World Bank.