Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced this week that each school would be investing $30 million (yep, that’s $60 million total) in creating free online education courses.As some of you may know, online education sites like Lynda.com and ArtistWorks.com are some of the hottest paid content niches out there. So competition from universities willing to provide educational content free of charge may give subscription site professionals reason to pause.On the one hand, this could be a repetition of the “original sin” committed by newspapers, who made their content available free online and with no plans to monetize. They cannibalized the revenues in their own industry and are now struggling to smack together a way to monetize their work.On the other hand, when Google came out with its free Google Website Optimizer, companies creating testing software were nervous. Yet, according to our sister site, WhichTestWon.com, free testing software introduced more people to the industry and led to an uptick in testing over a 24 month period. Turns out, thousands of marketers got their start with the free Google product, and then felt comfortable enough to “upgrade” to a paid software that better fit their needs.So in this case, perhaps Havard and MIT will help more education consumers feel it’s “normal” to take online courses, and thus open the market for the rest of us. Niche online education folks may not be celebrating yet, but they may want to put the champagne on ice.
