DIY U author Anya Kamenetz describes the Edupunk movement for Fast Company:

Is a college education really like a string quartet? Back in 1966, that was the assertion of economists William Bowen, later president of Princeton, and William Baumol. In a seminal study, Bowen and Baumol used the analogy to show why universities can’t easily improve efficiency.

If you want to perform a proper string quartet, they noted, you can’t cut out the cellist nor can you squeeze in more performances by playing the music faster. But that was then — before MP3s and iPods proved just how freely music could flow. Before Google scanned and digitized 7 million books and Wikipedia users created the world’s largest encyclopedia. Before YouTube Edu and iTunes U made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free, and before college students built Facebook into the world’s largest social network, changing the way we all share information. Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before.

Fast Company: How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education

The article mentions some useful sounding sites:

Peer2Peer University – online community of open study groups for short university-level courses

Academic Earth – The Hulu of online lectures

Western Governors University – actual accredited online university I hadn’t heard of. No grades, and completing coursework is optional.

Here’s an interview with Kamenetz

My contribution to the “edupunk” movement is Personal University, which just launched its first complete program offerings in Computer Science. This project is now defunct.