The idea of breaking down courses is really interesting to me, because I think a "course" is a great way to organize content in a field. Let an expert guide you through a series of perspectives. But completing them often takes more dedication than most busy people can muster.
By breaking courses down to a more granular level of components, there is a huge chance to recognize people for the pieces they are able to complete and let them string those together in new ways that the traditional course designers hadn't thought of. But there are huge challenges around figuring out how different modules could be fit together into new ways. For instance, the Open Educational Resource repositories have had really slow adoption because of it, even though they have in total a ton of great educational content (and quantities of chaff).
I think it's really all about switching to a different metaphor for organizing content and examining the entailments of that metaphor to make sure their internal logic leads you to the values you want to promote.
By breaking courses down to a more granular level of components, there is a huge chance to recognize people for the pieces they are able to complete and let them string those together in new ways that the traditional course designers hadn't thought of. But there are huge challenges around figuring out how different modules could be fit together into new ways. For instance, the Open Educational Resource repositories have had really slow adoption because of it, even though they have in total a ton of great educational content (and quantities of chaff).
I wrote a little bit more about this today, and how digital badges could help a provider like edX crowdsource good organization of many distributed modules. http://remediatingassessment.blogspot.com/2014/08/mit-report...
I think it's really all about switching to a different metaphor for organizing content and examining the entailments of that metaphor to make sure their internal logic leads you to the values you want to promote.