Online Learning Course Platforms Offer Paid Freelance Gigs to Professors - Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Ed

As online courses multiply outside the formal structures of academe, professors increasingly have opportunities to earn cash on the side by freelancing. Udemy, an online-education company, offers anyone, including professors, the chance to design and teach an online course. Instructors set the prices for their courses, which tend to run from about $30 to $100 per student, and take home 70 percent of the revenue. The company’s latest recruiting strategy is to enter new instructors in a contest in which one of them will win $5,000 and the right to keep 100 percent of the revenue from his or her course for as long as the professor continues to teach it. In response to that proliferation of freelance opportunities, some universities have begun to write new rules for their professors’ extracurricular teaching. http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/online-course-platforms-offer-paid-freelance-gigs-to-professors/43971