You can blame “disparate impact” standards for this.  It is time to repeal them, which Ricci vs. DeStefano unfortunately failed to do.

I’m referring to human resource departments which are, as a rule, incapable of determining the quality of a prospective employee so punt the ball back to the college by demanding a degree. In some cases there’s no choice the law having been used to bar entry into fields to help hold up wage rates with a degree, once again, being used as the magic touchstone that assures quality standards’ve been met.

How do open learning advocates propose to advance the cause against impediments like that?

“This may seem like a small pedantic point, but careful readers know that when the author cannot avoid an obvious logical mistake in the first few words of the item, the remainder of the reasoning is equally suspect.”

Does the same apply to spelling, usage and grammar?

You’re wrong. It means “no American can go to college.” There is no other meaning. Garner’s not infallible.

While it's true that there is some ambiguity in this sentence, and that "Not every…" is probably the better construction, Joanne's use of "Every…not" is both correct English and has the meaning she intended. It's problematic only because it *additionally* is susceptible to another interpretation, which might cause confusion in some cases. Although it doesn't in this case, I think. Language =! logic, and some ambiguity is par for the course.

See the discussion of "All…not" vs. "Not all" in Garner's Modern American Usage for more.

(If this blog is going to win an award as a leading language blog, we need to help Joanne live up it )

On the actual topic, while I'm a fan of using the internet to help with learning, I'm still pretty skeptical that it will have more than a niche impact or will meaningfully reduce the cost or convenience of attending college.

Why not have it so a person can take a course from MIT, Macomb CC, Rice, etc. and piece them together into a degree? Where are the validating institutions to assure such programs are up to snuff? Seems logical enough to me.

As to the first sentence, maybe… “Not everyone can go to college, but…

FWIW, most standard (and advanced) high school courses are already online in some form — for home schoolers, distance learning, etc. I don’t see why one would waste resources re-inventing the wheel. Just go and see what’s out there and pick the best.

Open ecducation is about much more than “high quality courseware”. Indeed, it is arguable (and I would argue) that packaging open learning resources into pre-compiled course packages makes them less useful and less likely to be used (there is empirical evidence to suupport this).

In any case, very few institutions actually provide ‘courseware’ – Britain’s Open University does, and (arguably) Rice University’s Connexions project does, but otherwise, open educational resources (such as MIT’s OCWS project) are simply collections of resources intended to be reused on an ad hopc basis by teachers and instructors.

One of the things people working in open education and online learning have learned over the years is that you can’t just arrange all the contents into a sequence and expect people to simply follow along. This only works (if it works anywhere, which is doubtful) where participants are required to take mandated training. It does not work at all in an open environment.

What we see outside very narrowly defined institutional projects is the development of open educational resources (OERs) by a wider community, through the process of dialogue and interaction, in which experts and novices participate in an exchange of questions, suggestions and responses, and where a shared library of canonical materials accrues over time.

Learners, in such an environment, don’t so often receive guided expert-based instruction (though they may from time to time sign up for should courses or online conferences or seminars) but rather learn by participating in the relevant community, often becoming familiar with new content and new ideas by themselves producing resources that others review and share.

The OER movement is very much an international movement, with a lot of support from the United Nations (especially UNESCO) and OECD. American involvement to date has largely been through major educational foundations, such as the Wellcome Trust or the Hewlett Foundation (which have funded the major projects at MIT and elsewhere).

The proposition “Every American can’t go to college” means the same as “No American can go to college,” which is demonstrably false, and almost certainly not what you mean.

Probably, what you mean to say is “Not every American can go to college.”

Or, if you want to express the point using a negative tone (this is, after all, Joanne Jacobs) you could say “Some Americans cannot go to college” or even “Most Americans cannot go to college.”

This may seem like a small pedantic point, but careful readers know that when the author cannot avoid an obvious logical mistake in the first few words of the item, the remainder of the reasoning is equally suspect.