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The open-source educational marketplace will give everyone access to the best universities in the world. This will inevitably spell disaster for colleges and universities that are perceived as second rate. Likewise, the most popular professors will enjoy massive influence as they teach vast global courses with registrants numbering in the hundreds of thousands (even though "most popular" may well equate to most entertaining rather than to most rigorous).

"There are a few other players such as Edx/Classto Go,  CanvasNet and other who have a different model and are worth looking at. But surely, if we are serious about a social commitment to education that leads to a real qualification that will help make an actual change to peoples lives we should be looking at the OER University model."

"Coursera has been informed by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education that under Minnesota Statutes (136A.61 to 136A.71), a university cannot offer online courses to Minnesota residents unless the university has received authorization from the State of Minnesota to do so. If you are a resident of Minnesota, you agree that either (1) you will not take courses on Coursera, or (2) for each class that you take, the majority of work you do for the class will be done from outside the State of Minnesota."

"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."

""It will be harder to get into Minerva than any other university," says Nelson. "You'll have the same criteria for your grades, essay, and application. But you'll get no brownie points for how good an athlete you are, for how much money your parents can donate, or for what state you were born in.""

""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%."