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"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."

"For the vendors, when this model works they get a far higher revenue per student that would have been possible with platforms sales or other fee-for-service approaches. As I described in a post about 2U, that company makes $10k - $15k per student per year, whereas an LMS vendor might make $20 per student per year. While 2U is the high end of the market and not all OPM vendors get that kind of revenue, we are talking about several orders of magnitude difference per student."

#udsnf12 recent upheaval at UVA was connected to some of the MOOC questions we discussed in class.

"I think it is rather like a shared textbook, though I think the key distinction is you cannot give a textbook to a shared group of students and expect students to learn from it," Koller said. This creates some new ways for Coursera to bring in cash. Right now it is relying on charging for verified completion certificates and revenue from an Amazon.com affiliates program if users buy books suggested by professors.

"When machines anticipate needs and wants and solve problems without consulting their owners, we will be living in the future. I believe the infrastructure, the revenue model, the customer base and the deep learning techniques are finally ready to enable entrepreneurs to seize the opportunity and build the future."

New York-based Adafruit is working to help reverse that trend, and to make it so that people aren't afraid of what's inside their devices, and instead become more comfortable with electronics components and the concepts behind how gadgets actually work. Adafruit founder and CEO Limor Fried was on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY today, and talked about how her company is going about achieving that goal. The mission helps the company generate revenue, by priming an audience early on to become buyers of the components, DIY kits and open-source devices Adafruit sells through its online store. The key is to start young, Fried says, and to take advantage of urges that children already have around exploring their environment and the things around them.

"By the end of June, Murdoch's News Corp. will have invested more than $1 billion in Amplify, its division that makes the tablets, sells an online curriculum and offers testing services. Amplify, which never set a timetable for turning a profit, has yet to do so. It reported a $193 million loss last year, and its annual revenue represented only about 1 percent of News Corp.'s sales of $8.6 billion."

"Righting the ship will require borrowing a page from the community-college playbook, by adding employment-ready programs like nursing (as Holy Family has done) and computing to entice disaffected degree-seekers. Developing online and hybrid teaching methods might also raise revenue from adult learners. Mostly, self-preservation will require both professors and administrators to accept cost-cutting, which will hardly be easy. Even though St. Joe's ended the year with a $7 million surplus by embracing some of these measures, its administration became cannon fodder for faculty. But if more schools don't follow suit, it could spell closures. "For those college presidents unwilling to reboot," Hartman warns. "I've got one word for them: Detroit.""

"The company announced that, for the first time, it generated more revenue from digital products than print. This seemed to go relatively unnoticed by most, likely because we all took the evolution for granted, but it is a key milestone in the ongoing reinvention of learning content for Higher Education."

"The new university/company AI partnership model will resemble the current online program management model, in which the AI company de-risks the AI investment with up-front capital and resources, and is paid by a revenue share."

"While distance-learning programs are not likely to replace the traditional college experience for everyone, the rate of growth in online enrollment is outpacing that for campus enrollment. The market for online programs is crowded and relatively easy to enter, but traditional name-brand universities now claim a larger share of it than in the past. This means smaller institutions with less-established programs will struggle unless they can set themselves apart, according to the report."

"If one studies the interest publishers have shown in the OPM market, one sees the desire for them to create this revenue envelope by being the one-stop shop for aggregating everything their customers need: from content, to technology to program design and marketing. Even thought McGraw's next CEO, Cengage's Michael Hansen, declared recently that the company would stay away from "the business of recruiting students to schools," I would be shocked if the new McGraw Hill were not in some way equipping schools to build their own OPM capability - much the way John Katzman's Noodle is set up."