Star Academies?

"Welcome to Star Scholar U, where professors are the credential".
Professors deliver self-service online courses | The Daily Caller

Founding a university may sound dramatic, but in an era of easy-to-use online tools it can be done as a side project—akin to blogging or writing a textbook. Soon there could be hundreds of Star Scholar U’s.
Two recent examples are Marginal Revolution University, started by two economics professors at George Mason University, and Rheingold U, run by the author and Internet pioneer Howard Rheingold. To be clear, these professors are using the word “university” loosely—they award no credit and claim no spot on any college ranking. And they probably won’t become rich through their teaching. But the gambit gives them full control over the content and delivery methods. And it offers their personal brands as a kind of credential.

Rheingold U is new to me:

Rheingold U. is a totally online learning community, offering courses that usually run for five weeks, with five live sessions and ongoing asynchronous discussions through forums, blogs, wikis, mindmaps, and social bookmarks. In my thirty years of experience online and my eight years teaching students face to face and online at University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, I've learned that magic can happen when a skilled facilitator works collaboratively with a group of motivated students. Live sessions include...

I dunno. The idea of the star as teacher is at least partly a matter of student incentives...of generated focus. Maybe we can have an actual profession which is "course designer", and an actual profession of course certification/evaluation, and a star lecturer can do the actual mini-lecture deliveries...how about real stars? Patrick Stewart as a physics lecturer? Does it really matter if he understands what he's saying? (Taylor Swift as a psychology lecturer?) Extend the mini-lectures with mini-dialogues, in which an actor/student takes a role with which the actual student can identify -- in fact each mini-lecture becomes multiple online mini-dialogues, so you can follow along with the education of the fictional character you most identify with, interacting with, well, with the
"Second star to the right, and straight on till morning."
Or then again, maybe not, except in Neverland.