[aik]

Even more interesting to me anyway is the fact that this is potentially a sign of a shift in the industry from importance of the traditional higher education credential to importance of a worthy alternative credential not owned by traditional university systems and structures -- which is extremely exciting.

I still agree that the networking components and group-learning (or face-to-face interaction) are missed (and are extremely valuable), and so it will be very interesting to see how this new paradigm deals with that issue.