> trying to compete with the credentialing system of universities
Which gets even more difficult when places like Georgia Tech are offering fully accredited Masters of Science in Comp Sci programs, delivered fully online, for a grand total of $7500 in tuition.
I don't think any sort of 'certificate' or accreditation approach was the right strategy for them. I was probably their prime candidate for paid certs -- I am a lawyer who self-studied CS for 4 years and just recently successfully switched careers to software dev. I took so many online courses -- Coursera, edX, MIT's OpenCourseWare, Stanford's online courses. In every interview I had, the interviewers were impressed by the fact I took such a variety of courses (I listed them on my resume, underneath my "real" education history.)
But not a single one ever even asked if I had obtained any sort of certificates from them. No one cared, not even for a second. The whole story you want to tell when you go this way is, "I got the practical learning and experience I needed; I didn't go for an official degree because I felt the piece of paper wasn't worth the money." The proof (for potential employers) that you succeeded is in your abilities -- specifically, your portfolio of personal projects you create and are ready to present. Taking all those online courses shows initiative, curiosity, passion for the field; a certificate of any sort from some place like Udacity means less than nothing.
Would it have mattered any more if it was accredited by some accrediting body? My intuition says no. Employers feel comfortable relying on traditional degrees because they're, well, traditional. There's the whole cultural significance of them, and of the experience of attending a four year program. But, right or wrong, the value of these degrees comes from the school name. Is it a nationally known school? Or a regionally known one? Is it a school in the city that your interviewer (or their coworkers) attended? But if you come to them with some accredited papers from Udacity, there is going to be a very wide respectability gap that will have to be crossed.
It's not an inspiring approach, but I can't help but feel like a bland subscription model is probably the best they could have done. Maybe they could have become Google's Pluralsight or something. I think there's still definitely room for 'disruption' in the online education space, but I think it's probably going to look and feel a lot more like traditional higher ed than many might have thought 5 years ago -- even to the extent that I think we'll see traditional schools leading the way, because those traditional schools come to the starting block already carrying a lot of cachet. Why pay for a piece of paper if the name at the top means nothing?