This article is premised on the idea that colleges are selling education. Colleges sell a credential and I suppose a token to access the reputation and ability of other credential holders.

The credential is the scarce good whereas education is increasingly free. It makes sense that they'd focus on pricing related to the credential rather than the education.

I think people are buying the college's recruiting filter and its reputation first and the college's education second.

+1, More and more true. Plus there is never an incentive for universities to lower price.

There is if they can't fill the seats.

I think that something like the Math Emporium could represent an excellent additional resource ... but using it to replace lectures altogether would seem, to me, to be a missed opportunity and a big mistake. I hope that they at least have something like recitations / TA-led classes so that students can get face time with, periodically, with someone knowledgeable w/re to the subject matter.

Also, the article says "The key is letting computers do what they do best - grading multiple-choice tests, [...]".

That's alarming because it suggests that the automatically generated practice tests and possibly even the real, proctored tests in the Math Emporium scheme are all multiple-choice. For exams in introductory, memorization-heavy humanities courses, that's fine, but the multiple-choice format is ill-suited for math. There's no way to assign partial credit for wrong answers and, more importantly, there's no capability to examine the steps that the student took when trying to find the solution to a given problem so that their mistake can be explained to them.

Based on the article, it sounds as though Virginia Tech is replacing part of their undergrad math curriculum with Kumon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumon) for grown-ups. Depressing.

The online hw and tests that I have worked with for math classes are fill in the blank with the correct answer. The computer refuses incorrect answers and will give them a specified number of retries Its a pretty savvy way to save time, especially on hw and gives students instant feedback.

I wish I had the math emporium for my entire degree and every single course, because the quality would of been better every single bloody time.