from an open textbook. As Siemens suggests, close alliance to revenue funding will come to dominate the concerns of start-ups, and openness is usually the first casualty when this happens. Given the costs of creating a MOOC, and the return that universities will start requiring for the investment of their staff, it is debatable whether MOOCs can be sustainable as a stand-alone business. As with OERs, they may be sustainable as an adjunct to existing university practice or for national agencies, charities and professional bodies who have an interest in engaging learners. Unless they are rooted in openness, however, it is unlikely that this will remain a central tenet of their identity. It may well be that MOOC providers transform themselves into low-cost education alternatives by offering a combination of quite sophisticated unsupported courses and automatic assessment. This would have a profound impact on access to education and higher education itself, but it would be a different proposition to their original 'open as in free' model, and it would have more in common with the open entry model of distance education personified by open universities. Whether elite universities would continue to subsidise a low-cost provider through provision of courses then becomes questionable, once the open aspect has been removed.
Conclusions
MOOCs didn't appear overnight from nowhere, although one might be forgiven for thinking so from the coverage they received. Figure 8 from Yuan and Powell (2013) provides a clear indication of the contributing influences for MOOCs.
While some MOOC providers, such as the Harvard and MIT founded EdX, can be seen as part of a continuum with OERs, others have developed along commercial lines. To learners on
