Open Courseware (OCW) is not, at least not yet, a pathway to a degree.  On the MIT site, it states[1]

“MIT OpenCourseWare is a free publication of MIT course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT.

• OCW is not an MIT education.
• OCW does not grant degrees or certificates.
• OCW does not provide access to MIT faculty.
• Materials may not reflect entire content of the course.”

This clarification about OCW is generally shared among the member institutions of the OCWC, so we can take MIT’s disclaimers as representative. Taking each of these disclaimers in turn, we can see that:

• An MIT education is more than simple access to the resources. Upon examination, this statement is obvious, as we know that MIT students benefit (possibly immeasurably) from the face-time with professors, peers, and others on campus, from the myriad non-digital resources that are available, and from the immersion in the overall academic environment. Simply viewing the raw information associated with courses clearly does not replicate these other facets of the educational experience.
• You have to be fully immersed and engaged in the MIT ecosystem in order for MIT to grant you an MIT degree, something that cannot be done with OCW, as far as we know.
• Access to resources is not the same as access to the faculty, many of whom are the authors of the resources. This should come as a surprise to no one, as we rarely expect to have a direct line of communication with book authors simply as a condition of buying (or borrowing) the book. But this disclaimer reinforces the point that, as already stated, access to MIT faculty is a privilege reserved for fully admitted MIT students, and access to OCW is not a replacement for the presumed educational benefits of that access.
• There are many constraints to the publication of course material, including licensing restrictions, privacy laws, inability to digitize certain things, cost, and so on. OCW, by design, is not a facsimile of the contents of a course, but rather a digital approximation of the resources subject to the constraints at hand.

Our interest here is whether there is any possibility that OCW could be used in pursuit of a degree, whether from MIT or elsewhere. At first glance, it would seem that there is no viable solution for institutions like MIT to offer degrees to online students whose only engagement with the institution is via OCW. As the disclaimers make clear, an MIT education is much more than the access to the materials of instruction, and these other elements of the educational experience do not seem amenable to online delivery.

But in fact there are many projects, including OpenStudy[2], Peer 2 Peer University[3], University of the People[4], Academic Earth[5], and others, who are working hard to replicate and perhaps even improve upon the benefits of institutional admission, but via one or more online platforms. Many of the social dynamics of education can now be replicated on the Internet. In point of fact, many of those social interactions are actually better on the Internet, given the inherent capacity of the Web to support interactions that transcend time, space, and other barriers to communication. Further, many of the most important research tools of the university are moving online, including telescopes, raw computing power, and access to relevant literature and databases. Some initiatives, such as OLI at Carnegie Mellon University[6], have demonstrated that some form of hybrid instruction (online and face-to-face) seems to produce the best outcomes, where students benefit from the real-time feedback of computer-mediated self-instruction, but also have an opportunity to engage with peers and professors in person.

Institutions can get into the business of offering credit for people who learn via OCW, but only if they can more coherently define the differences between learning via OCW versus learning via physical presence in institutional classrooms. The premise that face-to-face instruction is inherently superior to the rapidly developing online options is more and more questionable, so the burden is on existing institutions to illustrate how offline learning environments are different, and perhaps worthy of greater expense, in measurable and meaningful ways. I believe the value is there, but is currently hidden. Expose that value, and the barriers to institutional monetization of learning via OCW will fall away.

[1]http://ocw.mit.edu/about/

[2]http://openstudy.com/

[3]http://p2pu.org/

[4]http://www.uopeople.org/

[5]http://academicearth.org/

[6]http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/