"For Exposure, Universities Put Courses on the Web"

I read the article “For Exposure, Universities Put Courses on the Web” published by the New York Times on November 1, 2010.

Democratizing higher education via the Web was the theme of this article. Where once, an individual had to be enrolled in a prestigious university to obtain a world-class education, now that same individual can obtain that knowledge on the web, often times at no cost.

OpenCourseWare is associated with 250 schools worldwide and offers courses in Chinese, Dutch, English, Japanese, Russian, Spanish and Hebrew. When M.I.T. announced that it was going to offer its entire course catalog online in 2001, it spurred a global Open Education Resource Movement. Now, Harvard and Yale are among the universities offering courses online.

Even though participants do not receive credit for taking courses, proponents of this movement believe that their courses offer a gateway to future enrollment.

I found the article to be enlightening, but found myself asking a few questions:
o How do we engage (all sectors of) the developing world to participate in this exchange?
o What educational systems were in place in England that allowed them to provide an Open University for four decades?
o Can an educational model that produces information for students at no cost, survive without providing some form of accreditation?