Others aren't really interested in your credentials. University is a personal achievement thing. As long as you feel the education you received is equal or greater than what you would have received in a brick and mortar institution, you should be happy with that, no?

With that said, most people do place a lot of value in the connections they made during their time in school. I'm not sure those connections can be built by online institutions. That may have a dramatic effect on opportunities one has later in life.

On an unrelated note, I had a teacher in high school several years ago that figured universities were already obsolete at that time. It's interesting it is a topic still in debate. Perhaps he was a man ahead of his time; he teaching style certainly was.

I would say credentials do indeed matter, although yes they are overshadowed quite a bit by professional networks.

Outside of simply procuring a job, they matter even more. As an example, the company I work at offers professional education services on CUDA and OpenCL (with other HPC architectures in the works). One of the guys who teaches it did his masters in EE at Stanford. I don't think the impact of that can be overstated when selling the service to companies.

The proof will be in the pudding, as we say. All that we need is a few digital learners to go on to become world leaders in some particularly hard fields. That will get the attention of the mainstream parents.

Many parents are very conservative in their approach to education, and the parents see the University path as the most certain way forward. Since the parents are largely the motivators toward higher education and sometimes pay the bill, they're a large target audience to reach.

Seems like a similar problem is being faced with academic publishing. The existing silos have high prestige, so it is not obvious how to disrupt them, becasuse newcomers can't compete on price/convenience alone. Coming up with objective measures for quality (standardized tests for universities, something other than impact factor for publications), might be a good route to open these fields up in both cases.

We don't really need new universities in order to deliver online education. The reason these have appeared is because they've spotted a gap in the market. The solution is for existing universities with recognised brands to offer their courses online.

Problem is they have no motivation to change. Universities must like the relative simplicity of taking a big chunk of money for sitting a bunch of glazed over students in front of a blackboard for a few hours a week.

Once they go online not only will they have to justify their fees but students may get this crazy idea that the university should be there to help them fulfill their own learning goals.

I do think you have a fair point.

I suppose that some of the more mercenary universities (or those that can't attract a lot of physically present students) may do the math and realise that they can make more money in total by going for the "pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap (on the internet" approach.