(edX employee here)<p>I&#x27;m not particular privy to whatever tactical insight our leadership has on Udacity, Coursera, etc... but I can tell you where edX is looking to head as a MOOC when it comes to college&#x2F;university partnerships.<p>We have our partner-developed content.  This is stuff like Harvard&#x27;s CS50, MIT&#x27;s 6.00.1x, etc.  High quality content.  People are very eager to take the courses -- they&#x27;re developed by professors, TAs, etc, from these schools, and, to be honest, there&#x27;s a lot of front-loaded name recognition -- but there&#x27;s also a good chunk of learners who go on to pay for a verified certificate.  On the flipside, we&#x27;ve talked to major businesses (tens of thousands of employees) who say they&#x27;re willing to treat these certificates, the output of these courses, in line with their campus equivalents.  That&#x27;s pretty huge for someone looking to beef up their resume.<p>The next evolution of what we&#x27;re doing by partnering with these institutions are things like Arizona State University&#x27;s Global Freshman Academy or MIT&#x27;s MicroMasters.  ASU&#x27;s Global Freshman Academy is taking your entire &quot;freshman&quot; year on edX, and getting real credit from it.  MIT&#x27;s MicroMasters (in Supply Chain Management) is taking a semester online, which makes you eligible for taking the rest of the degree (which is two semesters total) on campus.  These cost money; they aren&#x27;t entirely free like the standard courses on edX.  However, they&#x27;re deeply discounted and this is what our learners say they want.<p>Many people want credentials, they want them from top colleges and universities, and they want them targeted to specific fields.  Ultimately, these people just don&#x27;t feel <i>confident</i> figuring out which courses to take, and they want to be told which courses to take to get them to a specific place: better comprehension of X, better chances of job in a given field, etc.  This is what is precipitating a lot of the advent of the specializations&#x2F;nanodegrees, as you say.<p>(sorry, a little long-winded)