I really enjoy MIT's free course material. I loaded every lecture pdf onto my iphone and slowly but surely have been making my way through their mba program. Ba

I really enjoy MIT's free course material. I loaded every lecture pdf onto my iphone and slowly but surely have been making my way through their mba program. Based on my experience, I do not think a dedicated school program would work based on this material, and I am someone who is ALL for reform in higher education. The main reason is the nature of the content. Anybody can work their way through a management psychology or communication class, but you'd have to be very far out on the bell curve to teach yourself optimization models and statistical data mining based on this material alone. You could be familiar with how to do it based on lecture notes, which is my goal, but without help not one of your 18-year-olds could correctly solve these problems in the real world. They could educate to a degree, but their ability would be nowhere near traditional students. The pedigree's value will be preserved. Most of the classes have missing or incomplete material since OpenCourseware is clearly an afterthought. Someone would really have to go through the course reading list to be able to say they took the class.