edX - the nonprofit that was sold, and the company that bought it went bankrupt

In May 2012, weeks after Coursera signed its first universities, MIT and Harvard launched their own answer with a different premise: a nonprofit, funded by the two institutions with some eighty million dollars of their own money over the years, whose promise was that anyone in the world could take a Harvard or MIT class free. It grew from one MIT circuits course to 160 partner universities and 3,300 courses, and the Open edX platform beneath it was itself open source. By the sale it had 35 million learners and, for the year to June 2020, revenue of 85 million dollars and an operating loss of 17.

On 29 June 2021 the two universities sold it - the brand, the website, the marketplace - to 2U, a for-profit company that runs online degree programmes for universities, for 800 million dollars in cash, a sum 2U had borrowed the day before. The proceeds went to a new nonprofit, Axim Collaborative, charged with carrying on the open mission. Agarwal, the founding chief executive, said the buyer had made a legally binding commitment to preserve that mission and joined the company. A Harvard professor called the sale a betrayal of the trust faculty and students had placed in the platform when they signed on. Both statements are on the record.

What followed took three years. 2U's shares fell 86 per cent from the purchase; layoffs came in rounds, and with each reorganisation the founder received a new title; the edX blog, including the announcement of the sale, was taken down. A company valued at five billion dollars in 2018 was worth under 35 million by May 2024, and on 27 July 2024 it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, with the debt from the edX purchase - about 42 million dollars a year in interest - at the centre of the filing. The platform kept running, under the control of the creditors. The foundation holding the 800 million had, by then, barely been heard from.

The Pluralsight entry records a training library that became collateral for a lender. This one records a free university course catalogue that became collateral for a lender, with the difference that the people who built it were two of the wealthiest universities in the world, and they were the ones who cashed out. Nobody stopped the courses. Everything else that had made the thing what it was - the nonprofit, the open promise, the people - was gone within three years, and the record of the decision that did it has to be read on the Internet Archive.