These are all excellent questions, and I think they really pertain to the CCK course you are currently taking with Stephen Downes and George Siemens. The experiment I am talking about at UMW won’t be nearly so distributed in terms of credit, assessment and”authenticity. It will be tied to an institution, and the means for assessment and “authenticity” (I’ll talk about why I put this term in quotes shortly) will probably be very much rooted in what professors have done throughout their career. Keep in mind, however, that assessment is not a blanket set of rules institutions impress on faculty and students, professors often have the freedom to frame their own approach–which often makes it both loosely defined and necessarily flexible.

The term “authenticity” in regards to learning raises a ton of questions for me. What is “authentic learning”? The term is bandied around a lot by educational outcomes and assessment folks, but I am not so certain it is either definable nor quantifiable in the alpha-numeric system we have adopted. As for the veracity of an individual’s research or proof of someone’s findings, I think those issues remain whether you are within an institution or an independent learner/scholar in a distributed course. It’s a question of ethics, not authenticity per se, at least in my mind.

I think so many of the questions you raise are cornerstones of large, philosophical issues surrounding our educational system in general, whether or not it is online or in a traditional classroom. I also think many of these questions will become increasingly irrelevant in the future, because this system depends upon a centralized logic of accreditation, certification, and assessment. I may be wrong here, but I feel that one’s reputation will increasingly be premised on what they do with what they learn rather than how well they regurgitate the details of a pre-fabricated curriculum. The future of education will depend as much on thinking about the intellectual traditions and movements as it will encourage others to engage the creative revolution that has never been more readily available to the average learner. We need less assessment and routinized learning, and more creative space to expand the horizons of the human mind.