> many of the "extension" courses at universities are taught by people with at least a minimal affiliation to the university This is true, but it's not necessa

> many of the "extension" courses at universities are taught by people with at least a minimal affiliation to the university This is true, but it's not necessarily an academic affiliation. That isn't inherently a bad thing though, especially for more practical-minded courses. In the mid-aughts, when I was employed by Harvard FAS as a web developer, on the side I also TA'ed for the Intro to Web Development class at the Extension School for a few terms. The instructor and most of the TAs worked for various parts of Harvard IT. The course material was very current and high-quality as a result of being based on our hands-on day-to-day experience working in web dev, and we generally received very positive scores on student-submitted course evaluations. Granted, at my day job I also wrote a majority of the online course evaluation system used by FAS + Extension School, but I swear that didn't impact our high marks :) The underlying Oracle DBs were appropriately locked down anyway, as we took privacy laws like FERPA quite seriously.