In today’s Pope Center Clarion Call, Duke Cheston writes about “Great Big Ideas,” a set of twelve lectures by prominent academics. The concept is to compress into an hour lecture the key ideas that a non-specialist should know about a field. This is one more entry into the market for distance education and while you can’t earn credits for taking the course, apparently many people are interested enough to do so anyway. Isn’t that what education should be about — acquiring knowledge rather than credits?