Joel Liu's Library tagged Education →  View Popular, Search in Google

What's next? Putting more course materials on the net isn't really it. What should be next is much more challenging, but has immense payoffs... something like Khan Academy is doing with personalized learning.

"We set out to create a resource other faculty could draw on to improve their classes..."

It seems independent learners were an after-thought. There is immense amount of free educational content out there right now. The next step from here may be challenging. All of the what is available is great for independent learning. But the tools for engaging and collaborating with other students or professors is lacking.

We need something to connect teachers, students, independent learners together with the library of free material. Provide simple tools for collaboration inside documents like notes, bookmarks, etc. Add more extensive tools for authoring documents together.

In a conventional 'learn to test' scenario, one might feel naturally compelled to read and reread, or to take notes with the book open, simply out of desperation.

You may also learn something from the discussion itself, become aware of gaps, fill those gaps, get addition points of view and ways to think about it, reasons for holding opinions, which ones seem right but are wrong and why (and which ones seemed stupid at first but - dramatically - aren't). The social aspect, and the competitive aspect, will help you engage. Later, you might even recall some aspects episodically, e.g. "Jones said this, and Bloggs undercut him, and then I showed they were both wrong, and everyone laughed". Memorable.