Information on the life insurance industry…

Exams and paperwork could be done online at the location of “home university”. Teacher would be connected online at the remote location.
It would be like a University would “outsource” some courses to another university. All there needs for such an exam to happen is someone willing to supervise the exam at the “home university” and therefore certify to its correctness. (students did not try to copy during exam).

Have you heard of Globewide Network Academy, http://www.gnacademy.org/ ? Here is an excerpt stating their goals:
“We are a 501(c)(3) non-profit whose purpose is the research and development of open source tools that promote distance learning and online communities. We are happy to share our research, and code and to provide support services to other open source projects and non-profits.”

I think you’re on to something. An open course on topic X (with lectures, readings, assignments, etc., available for free online) could have a set of community-building tools to go with it–perhaps synchronous tools like chat, more likely asynchronous tools like discussion forums. That way, students who were learning from the open course materials could interact with other such students. The author of the materials could join the discussions from time to time, as well.

That’s not too far from what Wikipedia is, I think. Wikipedia gives you a page on a particular topic, with discussions about the page that anyone can join. The author of the page isn’t a credentialed authority on the topic, and there’s no multimedia or assignments, but the community tools are there.

I think the real challenge here is the one that Greg Byshenk raised above–who’s going to want to / be able to assess these students? Professors aren’t particularly great at assessment, especially when they’re assessing students not in their own courses. (For example, I took a qualifying exam in my second year of grad school that supposedly covered one of my first-year courses. The exam was not written by the teacher of the course, however, and there was almost no correlation between the exam and the course content.)

As for Greg’s comment about the use of the term “open source,” I tend to think of the term in the context of open source software. In that case, it’s not just the program that’s freely available (“open”), but also the underlying code, so that users can modify it if they so wish. That metaphor doesn’t really work for what Mills is describing here. There’s no code that’s used to generate learning content in general. In mathematics, however, many course-related documents are often written in TeX, a mark-up language that handles mathematical notation very well. I would want instructors who share their course materials to share the underlying TeX code so that others could modify their materials. That would be “open source.”

Students find their own teacher and study for the course then pay you to grade their work and award a qualification. Colleges throughout the third world advertise that they teach a course leading to a degree from your University. A whole secondary industry grows up publishing tables rating the quality of these courses based on exam pass rates and student satisfaction polls. The teaching and the qualification do not have to be from the same institution.

This is already happening to some extent. I was recently in Singapore and there are lots of universities with branches there or local colleges whose courses are ratified by universities in England or Australia.

As I understand it Oxford and Cambridge already do this. While your degree is from the university the teaching is all done by colleges which are independent. There is no law that says those colleges have to be physically in the towns of Oxford and Cambridge.