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Comment by salsayarroz | Hacker News Reader

I am confused, why is saas here, the same course is offered at coursera

edX's software seems much higher quality than Coursera's at this point, so I can see why Berkeley would want to port their course to work on that platform as well.

(My opinion based on having done the MITx Circuits & Electronics, and Game Theory and Cryptography from Coursera.)

That is a good question. In both cases it is the Berkeley class.

It looks like the edX course is 12 weeks whereas the Coursera course currently covers the first half of the course in 5 weeks.

Presumably, because Coursera's TOS require a substantial amount of notice to yank a course...

Berkeley is probably hedging their bets; they most likely expect Coursera to become more restrictive down the road - no other reason would make sense.

To expand on that, the for-profit Coursera seems like a great partner for universities at the moment, but in the future, if they become a force, a platform with millions of students, their profit interest and the universities' interests could begin to diverge.

Hopefully, the various platforms (Coursera, edX, Udacity) play nice together, i.e., it's only a small amount of work to setup the same course content on a new platform.

> Hopefully, the various platforms (Coursera, edX, Udacity) play nice together, i.e., it's only a small amount of work to setup the same course content on a new platform.

As Google SREs say: Hope is not a strategy.

(Especially when you're hoping against the economic interests of the players involved.)

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