Colleges are selling degrees, not courses. Putting “I watched a lecture on OCW” in your CV won’t get you anywhere [0], that’s why colleges are not the least bit

Colleges are selling degrees, not courses. Putting “I watched a lecture on OCW” in your CV won’t get you anywhere [0], that’s why colleges are not the least bit threatened by it. (Those videos could be a source of additional income but colleges luckily decided against that, probably because the market for course videos with a price but without a degree is rather small.) [0] Even if watching the lecture online would have the same effect as attending it in person it still wouldn’t get you anywhere. Anybody can (and indeed should) claim they watched an online lecture, it’s simple game theory. Degrees provide verifiable proof, at least to some extent. Edit: Oh, by the way, a startup could start administering tests and awarding degrees based on free online course material. It could theoretically provide similar proof like a real degree at a much lower price. That could be a threatening scenario for colleges but it is also unlikely because the barriers are enormous. Degrees are worthless without reputation (and the startup would have no reputation), there are probably considerable legal problems with this idea and colleges would probably start pulling their free videos pretty quickly.