My hypothesis has been that Coursera, in the midst of raising venture capital funds, had a broad compliance risk evaluation and this was raised by outside counsel. Based on their blogpost, I suspect they took voluntary action and then reached out to State (or vice versa), who likely informed them of the Syrian General License and are probably working on specific licenses for other countries (this will take months in the best case). While no one would ever likely go after Coursera for continuing the way things were, no one would ever advise them to ignore legal concerns either. Myself and others read into the Iranian and Sudanese exemptions as liberally as we can, and it was clear that this was an unfortunately reasonable interpretation. The law simply has not anticipated the rise of virtual, for-profit, non-accredited, non-degree-granting educational institutions; as such, it falls outside of General Licenses 1 (Sudan) and E (Iran). Hopefully, what will come out of this mess is a new General License, which was the reaction to problems on sport exchanges with Iranian officials last summer, since MITx has been pulling similar moves lately as well.
On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 8:10 AM, Rich Kulawiec <r...@gsp.org> wrote: > On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 12:17:00PM +0000, Amin Sabeti wrote: > > The main point is Coursera has done something that it's not legitimate. > > They were (apparently) forced to do this. It's not like Coursera > staff woke up one day and suddenly decided to block those countries > because they had nothing better to do. Please read: > > > http://hummusforthought.com/2014/01/29/us-bans-students-from-blacklisted-countries-from-getting-a-free-education/ > > ---rsk > -- > Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations > of list guidelines will get you moderated: > https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. > Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at > compa...@stanford.edu. > -- *Collin David Anderson* averysmallbird.com | @cda | Washington, D.C.
-- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu.
