Of course it wont work when the idea is to simply take a not-so-great physical concept (a course syllabus and weekly test structure) and just digitize it. It do

Of course it wont work when the idea is to simply take a not-so-great physical concept (a course syllabus and weekly test structure) and just digitize it. It doesn't matter what industry, this will always fail. Online shopping, for example, isn't just a easy access to the products found at a brick and mortar store; it is an entirely different way to shop. Amazon realizes this and knows that sometimes people want cheap (hdmi cables) and other times good quality (chef knives). Khan Academy gets it. You don't take a 'math course' but you answer questions and watch videos and you know how well you are doing in a general area. You know when you should study something more and you know when you are solid. I would love to see all online courses abandoned and instead follow a khan academy approach. Drop the course idea and instead have thousands of goals where each goal can be tracked by how well you handle problems. I used to teach in colleges and the number one reason a student became confused wasn't because they weren't as smart as the other students but something small that they missed. It could be as simple as not knowing how ftp works, or not being used to a *nix environment, or not knowing where environment variables are set in a windows environment. This same person might have decades of ide-based-java experience but struggle when asked to compile on the command line. The khan academy approach would distill all of these concepts into goals and would determine what should be your next area to study (looks like you got lost on using ftp, let's cover a few videos of that before we move into the next section).