Thank you, I enjoyed reading your analysis. These classes will have an interesting affect. My husband has considered finding courses that will help his employees and offering bonuses if they take them.

In reading your paper, the part I had to read more than once was this:

"This policy recommendation simply advances that DOE reprogram a small cadre of educators with the mission of aggregating and accrediting the full spectrum of free and near-free courses which comprise a standard Associate of Arts/Science degree"

What do you mean by reprogram educators?

Education is very ripe for disruption. :)

Being a life-long learner I have found educational opportunities literally everywhere and some of them for NO COST.
I have a dear friend who introduced me to The Great Courses awhile back. I highly recommend Dr. J. Rufus Fears's lectures on the Philosophy of History.
Marita (her name) hails from Finland originally. She said that when Socialism was introduced to Finland only two things were done correctly:
1) They did TORT Reform (no frivolous law suits of any sort).
AND:
2) They made education free for all as long as you wanted to pursue a higher degree.

She also added: "Other than that, Socialism doesn't work!"

I took a MOOC by John Hawks on Paleoanthropology. It was excellent, but it was a one-shot course because he (and his grad students, who figured heavily in the course) still had other responsibilities in terms of classes and research.

It did not help the course that the biggest find in PaleoAnth in the past 50 years occurred just before the course started. Paradoxically, Hawks' strong internet presence, prep for the MOOC course, and filming of the site during the early stages of the find resulted in him being invited to participate in the dig - which took away from the time that he spent on the class (at the very end). But who could resist an invitation like that?!

To the credit of the U of Wisconsin, they gave him permission to take most of a year off, before the MOOC, and fly around the world, taking video clips of current sites and research. Hawks is also a major proponent of scanning and massively 3D printing every hominid fossil we have so that (a) it won't be lost, and (b) every student can handle 'it'.

I subscribe to Coursera but when I look into their classes I fear that they will be too basic and/or touchy-feely. I can often learn the basic stuff on my own (even Hawks' course had a bit of this problem) - but it would be nice to have teaching on the next step. If there were such courses available, I would eat them up savagely.

Jan

www.wgu.edu

Fully accredited University. Online, I complete a full Bachelors in Computer Science in 18 months of class time, 30 months of calendar time, which included (2) 3 month breaks.

Total cost, less than $12,000.00. I also received 9 IT industry standard certifications.

Tuition is paid by the Term which equals 6 months. You can take as many classes as you can handle. My highest term was 36 credit hours completed for less than $3,000.00.

They have Business Degrees, I am signing up for my MBA in September, they have Nursing, Teaching. and again fully accredited so I can transfer to any other university if I choose.