I asked him, what made SVA special, since you could get everything you needed to train online. All of his professors wrote blogs and published books on the subject. Were the people there just better?
No, he said, it was the fact that the professors there took the time to teach a course that was timely and relevant, and worked with each individual student to further their goals, while also recognizing their individual talents. They wouldn’t lead someone down the wrong path. Furthermore, in this atmosphere of work, everyone strove harder.
So, I’d say these materials are just the base building blocks you could find anywhere. Sure, they’re top shelf, but the real benefit of MIT is the campus itself. An auto-diadect would have no problem parsing any materials, but somebody with that type of intellectual tenacity probably doesn’t need a degree except for professional licensing. Everybody else still needs the professor, which this doesn’t provide. It’s like Apple open-sourcing Darwin, WebKit and LLVM, but keeping all the important UI stuff proprietary.