Tarun Vagani reports that Coursera has served notice that it is closing its archive of prior MOOCs (massive open online courses). As Coursera put it in an email:

Effective June 30, 2016, courses on the old platform will no longer be available.

Also, Coursera is phasing out its free certificates to those who successfully complete a course, according to CourseraJunkie.

There’s nothing wrong with a MOOC platform charging for whatever they want to charge for. There is something terribly wrong with the educational system handing power over MOOCs to a commercial entity.

MOOCs are here to stay. But we once again need to learn the danger of centralized platforms. Protocols are safer — more generative, more resistant to capture — than platforms. Distributed archives are safer than centralized archives.

Thank goodness the idea of the Decentalized Web (or, as I prefer to think of it, the Decent Web) is gaining momentum. Not a moment too soon.

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