Sharecropping for Coursera

Coursera, the fast-growing, for-profit online education company, has become, as the Wall Street Journal put it, “an investor’s pet.” It has pulled in $85 million in venture funding over the last two years, attracting big-name investors like Kleiner Perkins and the World Bank’s VC arm, LearnCapital.

Those millions aren’t enough, apparently, to pay translators to help the company extend its online courses, or MOOCs, into foreign markets. Instead, Coursera is taking the digital sharecropping rout...