A handful of provocations — Biella’s note about F/OSS projects as educational institutions, Scott McLemee’s column on the Open Library, continual reading at Stephen Downes’s place, and as something of a counterexample, IHE’s article about summer online courses at American University — amplify my confidence that competence-based evaluation in an open (non-“course”-based, non-credit-based) system best fits the circumstances of online learning (especially for institutions with straitened resources).