You state that the biggest problem is assessment. Accurate assessment. I believe accurate assessment may be possible without a formal instructor, however it would require academic honesty on the part of the participants. Academic honesty is a key component of this discussion, and it will revisit this open-accreditation dialogue over and over again.

But setting that aside for a moment, let’s think about how assessments could be done without a formal instructor/assessor. There are online quizzes/exams, which are not negligible candidates for comprehensive assessment measures.

But what about other assessment methods that are meticulously set up by faculty/instructional designer and put in the hands of others? A good example: rubric-based peer-assessment. A one-to-one peer assessment may not give reliable results, but a many-to-one peer assessment will give more accurate results, for an individual student may overlook at failed criteria whereas three individuals are less likely to.

I’ve done peer- and self-assessments as a complement to my assessment of projects in both the online classes I teach, and the student assessments usually mirror my own assessments pretty closely. I will grant you that they earn points for doing accurate assessments, and so there may be a behaviorist explanation to the accuracy of their assessments, but it would be worth exploring more.

And what about fee-based comprehensive assessment services provided by a formal “instructor”/assessor? Dave Wiley’s been the focus of examples, so let’s see if he can bear one more: I engage in Dave’s un-facilitated open teaching (open content, resources, activities, project/paper prompts); as part of a self-organized learning community I post my final paper with Dave’s rubric for peer-assessment. They give me feedback, which I incorporate and resubmit to the group until I am ready to submit to the formal assessor–in this case Dave. When I submit it I pay Dave a fee for his time. Maybe $25 US depending on the length of the paper. He then gives his assessment and feedback, which may be certified.

My emphasis on the self-organized learning community is based on my experience in self-organized online writing communities, and listservs, and Web dev/oss discussion forums–there are plenty of people ready to give you their two cents–especially if you can make it easy for them to give it to you (i.e. a rubric). You and many others can probably attest to this.