&gt; <i>I think it&#x27;s just basic human psychology that once you have access to something, you start feeling entitled to it.</i><p>I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s true. People don&#x27;t seem to feel that entitled in the &quot;analog&quot; world. But the digital technology changes the equation, and frankly, I think our &quot;lizard brain&quot; is right on this one.<p>The marginal cost of producing another copy of digitally encoded product is essentially zero, and it requires <i>zero</i> specialist knowledge. Copying binary data is what computers are made for, it&#x27;s their basic function. Plus, the Internet lets you scale a digital business to the whole world for (almost) free. Honestly, what feels entitled is expecting that one should be able to scale their business by orders of magnitude while retaining the price.<p>(And in general, charging for copying data feels a lot like charging for air, but that&#x27;s another topic.)<p>But regardless, Coursera is really playing fast and loose with their credibility. It used to be that it was the place you could go to get a decent education on some topic for free, at any time and in your own pace. What it (and other sites like it) turned into is a money-making machine. You get forced to follow a particular schedule (&quot;yadda yadda people can&#x27;t learn if they&#x27;re not forced&quot;), the course materials are often available <i>only</i> during the particular time window and disappear as soon as the course ends, and now they&#x27;re also employing a lot of dark patterns to make sure you can&#x27;t even <i>find</i> the free courses. All that while talking how their mission is to bring accessible education to the world. Bullshit. They&#x27;re just making money because media wrote a lot about them and made them look hot.<p>You know how <i>real</i> revolution in education looks like? It looks like this thread: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11561770" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11561770</a> - the original article + the comment thread + the links in that comment thread.