When movie technology first came out, movie makers used it to film plays. I'm glad they didn't take the approach that they should find the best stage performanc

When movie technology first came out, movie makers used it to film plays. I'm glad they didn't take the approach that they should find the best stage performance of each play, film each one, and turn the collection into the standard movie library, and stop there. Fortunately, they soon discovered that movies didn't have to be limited by the constraints on plays. So many aspects of college-level courses are bound to the institutional needs of colleges. Courses must be taught to several people simultaneously and in sync, must be delivered in semester/quarter/term-long chunks, must be popular enough to support ongoing employment of local faculty & staff, must be taught in a way that allows for objective grading (so, for example, emphasize grammar rules over pronunciation in foreign language, regardless of actual relative importance, because grammar is easier to score "objectively"),and so on. Right now, these online courses are still basically movies filming plays. These classroom "plays" are the way they are, because that serves the needs of the institutions producing them. But the most effective way to learn something personally useful probably isn't going to coincide with maximizing an old institution's needs for prestige, profits, politics, and power. I'd like to see these monolithic "degree credentials" broken down to finer-grained "skill credentials" that are available a la carte from competing sources that optimize their approach differently for each specific skill and for learners with different circumstances, with the learning results validated by independent agencies that only care how much you know, not how you learned it, where you learned it, or how long it took. The last thing I want is a continuation of the "consistent brand and user experience" of today's universities.