Symbiotic Brands: Borrowing the Prestige of Stanford
The brands of both Udacity and Coursera, like many academic brands, are composed out of affiliations with many other academic brands. What else do you think of when you think of these companies? Above all, you probably think of Stanford University. The founders of both companies were Stanford professors, and, in the usual story, the foundational event was when Sebastian Thrun taught an online artificial intelligence course at Stanford that attracted 160,000 students, of whom 23,000 finished the course. In this version of the story, the MOOCs leaped into the world out of the brow of Stanford University, much as the goddess Athena leaped fully formed and armored from the forehead of her father Zeus. Another god had to split Zeus's skull open with an axe to facilitate the birth, but so far the rise of the MOOCs has not been particularly traumatic for Stanford. The spawning of Udacity and Coursera has enhanced Stanford's reputation for both pedagogical and technological innovation. Read Full Post >
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