From today's Chronicle of Higher Education:

A nonprofit venture by the University of Oxford, and Stanford and Yale Universities to provide online noncredit courses to the public has closed, citing financial woes.

The enterprise, known as the Alliance for Lifelong Learning Inc., or AllLearn, posted a message on its Web site this month saying it had folded because "the cost of offering top-quality enrichment courses at affordable prices was not sustainable over time."

A couple of immediate thoughts. First, a nonprofit venture is likely to NOT yield a profit, by definition. Perhaps the venture should have been specifically "zero profit," in which case it would have broken even?

This particular program offered only non-credit courses, which, as the story points out, was likely one of the major reasons for its demise. On the other hand, I have always questioned whether watching video and listening to MP3 recordings is a good way for students to learn. Perhaps the failure to find enough people willing to pay to access the non-credit course material reveals the answer.

I do wonder about the soft elitism embodied in the statement "the cost of offering top-quality enrichment courses at affordable prices was not sustainable over time." What exactly does that mean. All affordable enrichment courses are not top-quality? Yale, Oxford, and Stanford are, implicitly, not affordable?

The story claims that the venture generated $2.5 million in revenue in 2004-2005 but incurred expenses of $3.28 million. That is more revenue than I would have expected. On the other hand, what about on-line delivery of coursework should ultimately cost $3.3 million?

As a non-profit venture the program was a success.