Elite Universities' Online Play (Again)

The Coursera effort described in this article is an interesting new twist in the ongoing effort to "redefine" the delivery of university education. There has been a lot of buzz about Stanford's recent massively open online courses efforts, especially since they address the opportunity to deliver to tens of thousands of students at the same time. Surely this is an indication of the evolution of technology in the last decade, but I suspect also a little of the innovation that comes from a desire to see more revenue from courses offered in uncertain fiscal times. It all sounds interesting until you get to the "Can I get credit?" question that will get asked, and the discussion at the end of the article that essentially admits that credit would likely only come with an element of on-campus learning too. Still an awesome idea to make such compelling and diverse course offereings available for anyone to take - isn't this what universities are ultimately about?