On the surface that doesn't look too bad, but I'm pretty skeptical of this sort of thing. I couldn't really tell what sort of course materials that the open university uses, but I think that generally the resources that these folks provide are more of a supplement to traditional education than they are a replacement. The Open University seems to still use traditional evaluation methods, like tests, so it probably isn't that bad.

The problem with the university I posted is more about academics who poorly understand how students' motivations work. I've seen many people take classes where they though they knew what was going on, until they got a test or a few homeworks back, so if you get rid of evaluations, you will push through many students who don't actually know what they are doing. Students are exceptionally good bullshitters, especially to themselves, and I've seen so many students who were convinced they knew what was going on in class, up until they got feedback from exams.

The other 'red flag' that I see with these new age academic types is that they always want to do away with lectures, because they claim students perform poorly in a lecture environment. This, I think, is a result of looking at averages, because some students do perform very well in lecture environments, and some lecturers have most of their students perform very well, so the questions should be "what makes good lecturers so good?" and "how can we better prepare students for lectures?" not "what do we replace lectures with?".

However, the reason these questions aren't asked by (bad) administrators is because they see education as a commodity. They don't see the professors as independent actors or the students as active participants, they see professors as applicators of curriculum, and students as passive recipients of curriculum, and they would prefer it if the skill of a professor or the talent of a student didn't have any bearing on educational success. I understand the motivations here: it's easier to hire someone to teach a class if you don't need to pay them for their experience in that field or their ability to communicate complex ideas to students, and it helps retention rates if students don't fail their classes. The problem with this is that it results in mediocre coursework consisting of facts about things, but no relations between the facts, all taught at the lowest common denominator so that anyone can understand it. Fields of study aren't just some lists of facts to be learned, and I've seen firsthand what happens when people try to reduce them to that: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Astronomy all look pretty much the same. They aren't, of course, but they can all be forced to fit the same easy formula, and that's what I'm wary of when people introduce these new education methods, that they strip out most of the important value in education.

It is really hard, I'm realizing, to describe this to someone who hasn't necessarily seen it. Is this all gibberish, or does it make sense?