Education is as much about content as it is about the social experience. Putting videos of the lectures online is a great way of distributing content, but just

Education is as much about content as it is about the social experience. Putting videos of the lectures online is a great way of distributing content, but just like books, it is not enough. The experience of going to a class with other people and collaborate on projects together has not yet been fully replicated online. There are some nice initial attempts at doing that such as openstudy.com, curiousreef.com and to some extent scratch.mit.edu (disclaimer: I created that website). It might be that we will always feel the need of face-to-face interaction for our learning experiences, but you could imagine a nice combination of meetup.com + some online social space + content. As for reputation, I think things like this (http://scobleizer.com/2011/01/02/crack-for-technical-recruiters-best-stackoverflow-users-handed-over/ http://scobleizer.com/2011/01/02/crack-for-technical-recruit...) point out future directions.