Dive Brief:

• The Campaign for the Future of Higher Education is maintaining its steady drumbeat of criticism against massive open online courses, challenging the leaders of Udacity, edX, and Coursera on Tuesday to a public debate about the “claims and promises” of the online education industry.
• Also on Tuesday, the group released a video called “Online Ed: Teaching Millions or Making Millions?" The clip includes cartoons representing the founders of the top three MOOC providers: Daphne Koller, Anant Agarwal, and Sebastian Thrun, who appears to be permanently wearing Google Glass.
• The campaign issued letters to the three last week, repeating the same basic themes about MOOCs promising more than they deliver and their motives skewing more to investors than to disadvantaged students.

Dive Insight:

Wouldn’t it be interesting to see Thrun, Koller, and Agarwal debating the powers-that-be in the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education? Apparently, none had accepted the debate challenge as of Wednesday morning. Tuesday’s flurry of publicity-filled activities piggybacks on the campaign’s series of papers released in October, which also criticized the online learning industry.