How do they ensure that teachers know what they're talking about? There's a lot of topics I can think of where someone can easily sound like they are an expert, but instead just have an amateur understanding of it. Any kind of topic involving some amount of subjectivity would be hard to ensure that best practices are being taught.
Having worked in higher ed for 10+ years, let me tell you, in a lot of disciplines, they don't vet as much as you might think.
Certainly, high profile/cost courses with lots of interest in teaching them are, but the big money makers such as con-ed, distance learning and apprenticeship take the most convenient person available and throw them in, often at the last minute with zero preparation.
Which is one of the reason those degrees are viewed as less valuable than a similar degree from a more prestigious institution which is assumed to have higher (teaching/admission/grading) standards. That is still the biggest obstacle for non-traditional education. How do you assess the value of the degree and then communicate that value to others?
>How do they ensure that teachers know what they're talking about?
AFAIK, they don't. There was a big fiasco recently when some guy who was teaching a C++ course was featured as "course of the week" or something, which got posted to /r/programming, and they basically tore him to shreds.
A lot of people were claiming that some of the problems were nit-picky, but there were certainly some significant issues with the code. It was the sort of stuff that someone who read C++ Primer probably wouldn't do, but someone who read "How To Program C++ in 21 Days for Dummies: the Absolute Moron's Guide" might.
The presentation was pretty terrible too, but that doesn't necessarily speak towards whether he knows what he's talking about.
