Knowledge Maps and Custom Courses

Take a quick look at the Khan Academy Knowledge Map and then think about The Chronicle of Higher Education asking Are Courses Outdated? MIT Considers Offering ‘Modules’ Instead

People now buy songs, not albums. They read articles, not newspapers. So why not mix and match learning “modules” rather than lock into 12-week university courses?

That question is a major theme of a 213-page report released on Monday by a committee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exploring how the 153-year-old engineering powerhouse should innovate to adapt to new technologies and new student expectations.

“The very notion of a ‘class’ may be outdated,” the report argues.

Indeed; a course is an administrative tactic, and we may be moving beyond it. At every level. I posted about the idea a couple of years ago, in Open-Source Learning. Perhaps it's getting somewhere.

Or then again, maybe not. Comments at Slashdot

Open-Source Learning

This morning's TED talk was Richard Baraniuk's 2006 Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning lecture. He wants to take a large number of books, break them down into small chunks, package each chunk in XML to make it easy to combine with other chunks (not necessarily the ones it originally came near) and replace the idea of a textbook with the idea of a collection of such chunks. Okay by me.
Actually, I'd like to see chunks, video or audio or text or all of the above, labeled with pre-requisites and objectives; these labels would also appear on knowledge maps like the Khan Academy's. Then you place yourself (or your teacher/tutor/advisor places you) on the knowledge map, perhaps by taking quizzes, and you identify your final objectives, and we identify lessons which are claimed to get you in the right direction....
Or then again, maybe not. The Connexions website did seem both clunky and underpowered, but maybe that's just me.