BRAND LOYALTY: Stanford birthed two of the most recognizable MOOC companies to date: Coursera and Udacity. Now, as these two Mountain View startups have taken the spotlight--and generous amounts of funding--the university is feeling like it's been left in the shadows, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Jane Manning, Stanford Online's director of platforms, suggests that the university is looking to host classes on open-source alternatives like edX for a couple of reasons: branding (even though students take Stanford classes on Coursera, the company--and not the university--get recognition, says Manning) and giving faculty fuller control over the content. (School officials point to the tenuous relationships between faculty and academic publishers like Elsevier as a cautionary tale as "what happens when power shifts 'from content creators to content aggregators.'")
