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"Just a handful of students have signed up for the for-credit version of the University of Washington's online courses, but thousands are taking them for free."

"When the Legislature convenes in January, my intent is to work with the governor and Legislature to appropriately update the statute to meet modern-day circumstances," he wrote. "Until that time, I see no reason for our office to require registration of free, not-for-credit offerings." But that may not be the end of the matter. If, down the road, Coursera starts charging for the courses or students can earn credit or certificates for them, the state might reassess its approach, he said.

"There are 8 possible monetization strategies that MOOC providers like Coursera, or Learning Management System providers could adopt:"

"Current students who take the free online college courses can earn certificates of completion, but not college credit. However, if MOOCs are determined to be close enough to traditional college courses as to become eligible for academic credit, they could make higher education more affordable and accessible, Ms. Lewin writes."

""There are good reasons to be anxious about universities...selling their name in exchange for something, and (suggesting) that the learning is somehow separate, different or less valuable," he said. "If what we've got is not worth anything - is worth giving away free - doesn't that feed into the general suspicion of experts that everyone's voice is equal, especially on the internet?""

"If you have an exercise bike in the back room, you could be the small selection of people that use it everyday to get fit. But then again, you could be one of many more who bought it in the hope of regular practice but were unable to make it part of your routine. The MOOC or Massive Open Online Course, which has come to prominence this year, often has much the same effect. Students may enrol in the online free courses from prestigious universities in their tens of thousands, but overwhelmingly they bomb out with attrition rates up to 80-90%."

"These dual characteristics of "open" are also core to Open Educational Resources (OER). Hewlett's updated OER definition begins: "OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others." That is, for an educational resource to be "open" it must be both gratis (available at no-cost) and libre (everyone has the legal rights to repurpose the resource). An OER cannot be freely available or openly licensed - it must be both freely available and openly licensed (or in the public domain) to be an OER."