What's next? Putting more course materials on the net isn't really it. What should be next is much more challenging, but has immense payoffs... something like Khan Academy is doing with personalized learning.
How awesome would it be if MIT did something like that, incorporating some of their incredible material?
"We set out to create a resource other faculty could draw on to improve their classes..."
It seems independent learners were an after-thought. There is immense amount of free educational content out there right now. The next step from here may be challenging. All of the what is available is great for independent learning. But the tools for engaging and collaborating with other students or professors is lacking.
We need something to connect teachers, students, independent learners together with the library of free material. Provide simple tools for collaboration inside documents like notes, bookmarks, etc. Add more extensive tools for authoring documents together.
The Khan Academy is great. But imagine giving the professor the ability to weave those videos and exercises into a textbook built from a library of other creative commons books. That would be exciting stuff.