I currently work in Higher-ed and I'm really excited to see what the long term effects of things like OCW and the Khan academy are going to have on education.

I currently work in Higher-ed and I'm really excited to see what the long term effects of things like OCW and the Khan academy are going to have on education. The simplest benefit is mediocre teachers will have a harder time hiding their incompetency, and all students will have access to the best teachers. When I took my algorithms class I followed along with the MIT lectures. My prof was okay, but nowhere near the level of competency of the L from CLRS and Erik Demaine. More interesting is the challenge these things pose to the authority of the entire system of higher education. What's going to happen when most top student at non-top schools get most of their lecture materials from someplace else? I can easily imagine a near future where most interested undergrad calc students learn from Sal Khan and only show up to class for exams. What does a degree mean when one student has done the exact same course work as another only for free? Autodidacts previously had suffered somewhat from lacking structured course work, but that problem is resolved. If you're motivated enough you can design your own education path which will most likely be more efficient than traditional ones. The obvious answer for higher-ed is to capitalize on what OCW and Khan can't offer: office hours, peer interaction, working on a research team, and lab time. Unfortunately, universities are almost incapable of rapid adaptation to change (we still put on silly medieval hats when we graduate).