Udacity to Launch 5 New Courses, from Statistics to Physics. Shooting for Largest Online Class Ever.

The arti­cle states “The course is entire­ly free and open to stu­dents every­where.”

While the course is free (and that’s great for afford­able edu­ca­tion!), it is not open. It is not OER.

Open Edu­ca­tion­al Resources (OER) are teach­ing, learn­ing, and research mate­ri­als in any medi­um that reside in the pub­lic domain or have been released under an open license that per­mits their free use AND re-pur­pos­ing by oth­ers.

For con­tent to be “Open” the user needs to be able to both (a) access the resource for no-cost / free and (b) have the legal per­mis­sions to reuse, revise, remix and redis­trib­ute the con­tent.

See Udac­i­ty’s terms of ser­vice here: http://www.udacity.com/legal

===============

Udac­i­ty’s INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS.

The Class Sites are owned and oper­at­ed by Udac­i­ty. Udac­i­ty reserves the right at any time and from time to time to mod­i­fy, dis­con­tin­ue, tem­porar­i­ly or per­ma­nent­ly, the Class Sites, or any part of por­tion there­of, with or with­out notice to you. You agree that Udac­i­ty shall not be liable to you or to any third par­ty for any mod­i­fi­ca­tions, sus­pen­sions or dis­con­tin­u­ance of the Class Sites, or any por­tion there­of. Noth­ing in these Terms of Use shall be con­strued to oblig­ate Udac­i­ty to main­tain and sup­port the Class Sites, or any part of por­tion there­of, dur­ing the term of these Terms of Use.

All con­tent or oth­er mate­r­i­al avail­able on the Class Sites or through the Online Cours­es, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to pro­grams, code, images, text, lay­outs, arrange­ments, dis­plays, illus­tra­tions, doc­u­ments, audio and video clips, HTML, and files (col­lec­tive­ly, the “Con­tent”), are the prop­er­ty of Udac­i­ty and/or its affil­i­ates or licen­sors and are pro­tect­ed by copy­right, patent and/or oth­er pro­pri­etary intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty rights under Unit­ed States and for­eign law.

Udac­i­ty logos, trade­marks and ser­vice marks which may appear on the Class Sites (“Marks”), are the prop­er­ty of Udac­i­ty and are pro­tect­ed under Unit­ed States and for­eign laws. All oth­er trade­marks, ser­vice marks and logos used on the Class Sites, with or with­out attri­bu­tion, are the trade­marks, ser­vice marks or logos of their respec­tive own­ers. In addi­tion, ele­ments of the Class Sites are pro­tect­ed by trade dress and oth­er fed­er­al and state intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty laws and may not be copied, repro­duced, down­loaded or dis­trib­uted in any way in whole or in part with­out the express writ­ten con­sent of Udac­i­ty.

Except as oth­er­wise express­ly per­mit­ted in these Terms of Use, you may not copy, sell, dis­play, repro­duce, pub­lish, mod­i­fy, cre­ate deriv­a­tive works from, trans­fer, dis­trib­ute or oth­er­wise com­mer­cial­ly exploit in any man­ner the Class Sites, Online Cours­es, or any Con­tent. You may not reverse-engi­neer, decom­pile, dis­as­sem­ble or oth­er­wise access the source code for any soft­ware that may be used to oper­ate the Online Cours­es. From time to time, Udac­i­ty may include soft­ware, code, instruc­tions, or oth­er such infor­ma­tion in the Con­tent or mate­ri­als for the Online Cours­es; any such infor­ma­tion is pro­vid­ed on an “as-is” basis for instruc­tion­al pur­pos­es only and is sub­ject to the Dis­claimer of War­ranties and Lim­i­ta­tion of Lia­bil­i­ties sec­tions below and oth­er terms here­in. Any use of such infor­ma­tion, com­mer­cial or non-com­mer­cial, out­side of this instruc­tion­al use is strict­ly pro­hib­it­ed. Udac­i­ty and/or its affil­i­ates and licen­sors reserve all rights not express­ly grant­ed here­in to the Class Sites, Online Cours­es, Con­tent, and Marks.

Sub­ject to your com­pli­ance with these Terms of Use, Udac­i­ty grants you a non-exclu­sive, non-trans­fer­able, non-sub­li­cens­able lim­it­ed right and license to access, inter­nal­ly use and dis­play the Class Sites and Online Cours­es at your loca­tion sole­ly as nec­es­sary to par­tic­i­pate in the Online Cours­es. You must abide by all copy­right notices or restric­tions con­tained on the Class Sites or the Con­tent. You may not delete any attri­bu­tions, legal or pro­pri­etary notices on the Class Sites or the Con­tent.