UC online: $4.3 million marketing campaign, one sale

UC Online prices -- click to view

The University of California had a grant and large loan to start UC Online, but the San Francisco Chronicle reported that they have only sold one course to a student outside the outside the university -- to a high school girl who paid $1,400 for an online pre-calculus course at UC Irvine and four units of UC credit.

For more on the financing, see this VentureBeat post.

It seems you can give courses away or sell degrees, but individual classes are hard to sell.