Online Education

In August of 2012 the online education company, Coursera, had drawn in a million users, a faster launching than either Facebook or Twitter. Coursera offers free college courses, all of which are taught by faculty members from 33 universities around the country. In less than a year, Coursera has attracted $22 million in venture capital and has created a ton of buzz. The co-founders, computer science professors at Stanford University, watched with amazement as enrollment passed two million last month, with 70,000 new students a week signing up for over 200 courses, including Human-Computer Interaction, Songwriting and Gamification.  

Other approaches to online courses are emerging as well. Universities nationwide are increasing their online offerings, hoping to attract students around the world. New ventures like Udemy help individual professors put their courses online. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have each provided $30 million to create edX. Another Stanford spinoff, Udacity, has attracted more than a million students to its menu of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, along with $15 million in financing. All of this could well add up to the future of higher education — if anyone can figure out how to make money.

Coursera has grown at warp speed to emerge as the current leader of the pack, striving to support its business by creating revenue streams through licensing, certification fees and recruitment data provided to employers, among other efforts. But there is no guarantee that it will keep its position in the exploding education technology marketplace. For their part, Ms. Koller and Mr. Ng proclaim a desire to keep courses freely available to poor students worldwide. Education, they have said repeatedly, should be a right, not a privilege. And even their venture backers say profits can wait.

Right now, the most promising source of revenue for Coursera is the payment of licensing fees from other educational institutions that want to use the Coursera classes, either as a ready-made “course in a box” or as video lectures students can watch before going to class to work with a faculty member.

While there is currently no profit stemming from these online education ventures, the future is still looking bright ahead. Expect to see this trend become the norm.

Manufacturing Growth

U.S. manufacturing activity rebounded in December, according to a report released Thursday. The Institute of Supply Management's monthly reading on the U.S. manufacturing sector came in at 50.7 in December, moving the index off its 2012 low of 49.5 in November. The index is compiled from a survey of manufacturing supply managers, and any number above 50 indicates the sector is growing. The December expansion marked only the third time the sector grew in the last seven months. New manufacturing orders grew for the fourth consecutive month, even though some respondents worried about tax implications in the new year and global economic conditions. "We are seeing stabilization of orders and costs as well as production capacity for the first time in months," one of the manufacturers, interviewed for the survey, said.

Factories have continued to hire, a welcome sign ahead of the monthly employment report on the U.S. job market due out Friday. The ISM employment index increased by 4.3 percentage points last month. November's employment report showed that manufacturers cut 7,000 jobs. Most of the losses came from food manufacturing, which was not a surprise given that Twinkies-maker Hostess announced early in the month that it planned to layoff 18,500 workers. Global manufacturing reports have shown a mixed picture across the world. A separate report on Thursday showed that manufacturing in Europe ended the year on a weak note. The eurozone purchasing manager's index contracted for the 17th month in a row, as levels of production and new orders continued to wane in December. The sector declined even further this month in Germany, Spain, Austria and Greece, but eased in France, Italy and the Netherlands.

The news was far better in China, where factories continued their expansion in December, according to a key manufacturing index released Monday. HSBC said its Chinese purchasing managers' index, or PMI, rose to a 19-month high of 51.5 in December from 50.5 last month. The fate of manufacturing in China is considered a barometer of the global economy because of the country's role as a powerhouse exporter of manufactured goods. 

With manufacturing on the rise, is it safe to say that the economy will improve?