After reading “Through the Open Door: Open Courses as Research, Learning and Engagement by Dave Cormier and George Siemens as well as “New Media Technologies and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning” from the January 2009 issue of The Academic Commons Magazine many thoughts came to mind.
The creation of open courses on the web and other forms of online education are bringing about many questions into the education arena. How will this impact higher education? Is online better than traditional courses or vice versa? There are certainly many considerations to be made as society enters a digital era. How does online impact educators, students, society as a whole? For students there are ups and downs…some students might be more inclined to participate in and impersonal electronic design where others might not participate as much given the option of not reading all of the posts. Online allows for students to pace themselves as they need versus in a classroom setting where all of the students must wait until everyone understands the subject matter. On the other hand, students lose the interpersonal experience with online classes. A broader question being is this the beginning of a transition to a society that only interacts with others virtually instead of face to face? What would that mean? It might be a plus for the environment, but what happens to psychosocial development and the economy. With open courses many professors could become unemployed as far fewer professors would be needed for instruction. In addition, secondary teachers could find themselves out of work if more parents chose home schooling over public or private education with the availability of instruction from the best of every area of study online.
psychosocialeducationalist 
You’ve raised a ton of important questions here. Will you venture any tentative answers?
One thing I tend not to agree with is that the traditional way of doing things in education will completely go away and be replaced with borg-like encounters that mediate learning. While some aspect of this concern can generate meaningful questions to consider I generally think of it as a bit of a FUD position (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt).
I don’t think online or traditional classrooms are inherently better than one another and each has positive aspects as well as negative. With open education students have the ability to learn from the best and brightest in any given subject no matter what university they were at. If all open courses changed to offering credit this would certainly make a drastic change in higher education…potentially a new accrediting body would have to be formed on a federal or international level to award degrees given that students might be taking courses from any number of universities. This could negatively impact those working in academia if they were to be deemed superfluous…there would be even more competition to be the best in your field to maintain job security.
The environment could definitely benefit from an increase in online education…far fewer cars on the road, reduction in energy use as academic buildings would most likely not be needed for use every day, etc.
I feel that the experience of attending a university physically is very important for social and emotional development perhaps even more than the intellectual development. This is where young adults begin separating from their families, forming their own values and beliefs, and learning to be an independent individual. Without this experience, I think many people would struggle to figure out who they really are and what they truly want out of life.