The idea is also too restrictive, because it takes “courses” as the only relevant components of a course. Part of this is the nature of research doctoral education: any doctoral student who thinks that they need to read only the required readings from their coursework is fooling himself or herself and going to get in trouble down the road. More broadly, we’re supposed to be socializing students into an academic (or professional) culture, and that’s not always “covered” by coursework. Some of those extra-curricular socializing experiences can become part of a program structure, as in internships, practica, and the like. But good doctoral students already engage in a good bit of intellectual remixing, both between courses and outside coursework.

And despite that, the idea is also impractical except where it comes out of the hides of the few faculty who can afford the time for this. There is also an ethical issue; to be honest, I’d never let one of my students take an independent study with me and have me assign a grade when someone else at another institution is doing the work; I think it’s neither intellectually honest of me nor fair to the other institution. What happens if all of my students want to take the course with you, and that happens across the country? You’d either be doubling your workload (or worse!) without pay, or you’d be doing work on BYU’s dime that BYU doesn’t get tuition for. In the meantime (at least in this thought experiment), I accumulate credit hours for my institution without doing a lick of work. Err…. no. As an experiment, it’s interesting. But there needs to be some experimentation around practical structures.

If there were a generic student-course cost-unit that were easily exchangeable among public universities (and even some privates), that might be a theoretical possibility. Where there are institutions with cross-registration, it’s absolutely doable. But outside some sort of exchange market that treats institutional resources as part of the equation (you do spend time on this stuff), it’s problematic. Given the extensive cost-shifting in higher ed from the public to students and their families, I just don’t think this is going to work scaled up just from the (fascinating!) experimental setups that exist.

So to the patterns that do exist currently, especially in undergraduate education: swirling and questions of which courses can transfer credit. That’s part of the huge conflict that came out of the Spellings Commission, because some people are advocating that a course is a course, and institutions should not have the right to deny transfer credit to you or me when I’ve taken Postmodern Quantum Basketweaving from the Institute of Occult Studies. There are states that address the vast majority of the issue by having common course systems within public institutions (as Florida does), but that’s not going to satisfy all of the issue, especially going between public and private institutions, or the reverse, or between states, or between for-profit and not-for-profit institutions.

If you want to continue on this path, I’d strongly suggest you talk with Barmak Nassirian, of AACRAO, so you can use the existing debates to think through the issues instead of getting tangled up in them.

George Siemens has some really interesting thoughts on this in his world without courses slides. I’ve tried to summarize some of that here: http://nixty.com/blog/2008/09/20/on-accreditation-and-open-education/

How about the “Open Diversity”?