The original business model of coursera&#x2F;udacity was to offer the option to take most courses for free, but require people to pay for credentials.<p>This is not obviously a bad idea: the quality of teaching at Harvard or Stanford is probably better than that you obtain in most universities, but the one of the main added values are the network of people you meet, and the credential of having attended a very prestigious university.<p>However: the kind of person that takes a lot of online courses is probably already an educated professional, and for her, the main added value is the joy of learning new things, and the credentials themselves are near worthless.<p>I&#x27;m sure they have lots of very smart people who thought hard about how to best monetize their offerings, but, for me, I would definitely pay a flat fee per month just to be able to keep sampling every course I want.