I welcome it. It's still really early in the game, the more competing platforms the faster the platforms will have to innovate. The inconvenience to the student is pretty minor, really.
Agreed. I think the actual reason, in this case, is that Stanford isn't sure it's comfortable putting courses on a private company's platform in the long run. So they've made the strategic decision to hire a team and build their own platform, giving them full control.
This makes total sense; we don't really know what direction Coursera and Udacity are headed as businesses, nor even what online education is going to look like or who the students will be. For Stanford, having the option to cut ties with Coursera is critical to Stanford's goal of being a leader in online university-level courses. And the platform is open source, meaning that depending on what happens, it could become a standard that more and more schools adopt.
And I, like you, think this is good for everyone. The more different the players are this early in the game, the more likely that at least one of them ends up doing it right.
