Marginal Revolution University

My favorite economics bloggers, being professors, have started a Khan-Academy-style online university with one course -- Development Economics; soon to grow. A Blog Hopes Its New Online Course Will Be More Than Marginal | The New Republic

one of Cowen’s many, many driving questions: what is education really for—what really makes it valuable? Mainstream economic thinking, Cowen noted in a lengthy 2006 blog post that foreshadowed MRU, views education primarily as a signaling device....
But Cowen posited that education is most efficiently used as a tool for self-improvement in the broadest sense. “Education is about self-acculturation,” he wrote, continuing:

education gives you a peer group, a self-image, and some skills as well. Getting an education is like becoming a Marine. Men need to be made into Marines. By choosing many years of education, you are telling yourself that you stand on one side of the social divide. The education itself drums that truth into you.

MRU is ultimately aiming for a better actual education, not a better means of signaling. ... “You can think of this,” Cowen says, laughing for the only time during our phone conversation and only lightly, “as a marginal attempt—a marginal revolution, so to speak—to get education to be more about learning.”
...a professor from the University of Oklahoma will lead a course on Mexico early next year—and Cowen is encouraging readers/viewers to make their own videos and send them in, with Tabarrok citing Wikipedia as MRU’s model here. Its optimistic motto is “Learn, Teach, Share.” This ad hoc philosophy is central to MRU’s method—and is potentially its greatest weakness.

As long as they're providing a resource for self-education and a resource for teachers in classrooms, that should work. If they need to evaluate students, I presume they'll have to develop some kind of peer grading; I've been thinking about networks of Google hangouts for that purpose. (You get assigned to a series of Google hangouts, working with different people and validating each other's actual existence...that it's actually you taking that test, for one thing.
Or then again, maybe not.