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Striking the right tone can be difficult. Professors aren't always natural performers, at least not on a par with professional actors. They also aren't famous, and Mr. Kimmel's setup works partly because viewers have a "parasocial" relationship to celebrities. That means they often know a great deal about famous people and even feel as if they're friends with them, even though there's a vast distance between them, said Dannagal G. Young, an associate professor of communication at the University of Delaware.

"As the online education market has matured, however, there has been a growing pushback against revenue-sharing as the only model available. Thus there is an emerging unbundled fee-for-service OPM model, in which the companies offer the same services, or some subset, for the market price of those services. The institution pays for the services used, mostly independent of the amount of tuition revenue coming into the online program. This category leads to the program, or institution, to take the up-front financial risk but not have to sign contracts sending ~40 - 60% of the tuition revenue to the vendor. Fewer strings attached but more responsibilities and risks for the school."

A coalition of faculty groups has declared war against online learning, particularly massive open online courses (MOOCs), because it said it believes that the fast expansion of this form of education is being promulgated by corporations - specifically for-profit colleges and universities and education technology companies - at the expense of student education and public interest.