Remote learning and open educational resources are nothing new. Recent years have seen the rise of iTunes U, YouTubeEdu, and the Open University’s innovative use of both these platforms. Last year MIT celebrated the first 10 years of its hugely successful OpenCourseWare initiative, which has shared materials from more than 2,000 courses with around 100 million individuals worldwide over the decade. The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organisation offering more than 3,000 videos – covering subjects from algebra to venture capitalism – assessment exercises and online tools, in what the Academy calls a “global classroom”.

What’s different about Professor Thrun’s online university, Udacity, is the public-private mix of the enterprise and the audacious ambition of the company’s founders. Thrun may have pioneered his free, online, open computer science course at Stanford University but he left his tenured position there last year. The course – along with others on subjects such as building a search engine and programming a robotic car (Thrun is co-inventor of the Google Street View mapping service and the Google self-driving car) – is now delivered via Udacity, a website owned by a company called Know Labs.

David Stavens, co-founder and ceo of Udacity, speaking down the line from the States, describes the university in the language of the Silicon Valley start-up: “The company is based in Palo Alto, California. We’re right in the heart of Silicon Valley – we’re about five minutes away from the headquarters of Google and two or three blocks away from the headquarters of Facebook. Right now we have 17 employees – software engineers, video editors, teaching assistants – and our goal is to put a complete computer science curriculum online in 2012.”

According to Stavens, the founders are “committed to there always being a free path through all the classes”, yet as a commercial organisation, the company must turn a profit. How will it square that circle?

The answer, believes Stavens, lies in the add-ons the site can offer, from certification to career services. The plan is to partner with a provider that can offer testing centres across the world to validate student identity and undertake in-person assessment.

“If you just want the education for the sake of education then you can enrol in the class and complete it and that will always be free. But if you actually need or want the certified testing services or the job placement services then that may come at an additional cost,” explains Stavens.

It’s a business model that also encompasses the traditional open education values of free sharing – apparently. Although there are no Creative Commons licence logos clearly displayed on the site, or referred to on the site’s legal, terms of service page, Stavens is adamant that “everything that is on our website is licensed under a Creative Commons licence so it’s non-commercial share-alike. So anyone in the world is allowed to download the videos and put them online anywhere else as long as they do it for non-commercial purposes. They are also free to remix the videos any way they like by adding new content or whatever they like.”

So what can a commercial company such as Udacity offer that, for example, Stanford couldn’t were it to develop its own online courses and platform?

“I love the not-for-profit education system,” begins Stavens. “I think that what we’re doing doesn’t supplant that in any way. I’m a Stanford University alumnus myself and also Princeton University alumnus and I think that for the foreseeable future, maybe forever, if you are able to get accepted to those types of institution and get a loan or get assistance or pay to go, I think you go. But what we’re hoping to do for the large set of students for whom that is simply not a choice, is to empower them with great education. I think that for-profit institutions are often able to move very fast, are able to really innovate, are really able to incite change in a really cool way. So I certainly think that for-profits can do good and have a positive effect.

“If a student wants a really great education then online providers are a reasonable choice for that student. Just as ten years ago social networking looked totally different until Facebook came along and made it really mainstream, and people from highly technical backgrounds had smartphones for a long time but it didn’t really become mainstream until Apple created the iPhone. I’d love to see that this generation of companies makes online education really mainstream,” he concludes.