With great interest, I read the recent news announcing that the American Council on Education (ACE) had evaluated five Coursera MOOCs and recommended them for credit. But I had hoped for something different.

Having traditional prestigious institutions making their online content open to the world – of course without their prestigious credit attached – was an exciting development. A race to post courses ensued. On the surface, it’s an altruistic move to make learning available to anyone, anywhere for free.

Dig deeper and we are left to ask, how many MOOC courses will really be worth college credit, where will the credits be accepted, and for how long will college credits even be the primary measurement of learning?

Now that ACE has evaluated a few courses, MOOC providers will see how their process goes as students start actually finding proctors and taking tests — or finding other methods of assessment — to prove they learned the material. But a few courses will not be enough to really help students earn degrees, and with MOOC courses and providers continuing to proliferate, this does not seem like a viable way to keep up with demand.

Regardless, it is more than likely that the universities that agreed to the ACE CREDIT review are never going to accept an ACE CREDIT transcript themselves. The students with ACE CREDIT transcripts will need to present those transcripts to “lesser known” schools that are not among the elite players – colleges with much lower tuition and a willingness to serve post-traditional students.

More troubling is the fact that the ACE process for credit review is still course-based. Will this really be flexible enough in the future? Will it measure competencies and individual learning outcomes? Even if it seems scalable, will it mean all MOOC evaluations have to run through ACE and only ACE? Will students have to wait until ACE has evaluated a MOOC course before they can get credit?

Moreover, this raises the question: Are course evaluations and testing really the best or only way to deal with this new era of learning? What about experiential learning? If someone has college-level learning from their life experience is it invalid unless they take a course?

As Inside Higher Ed points out in its article, this was a fast move in an industry that moves at a glacial pace. But when ice really begins to melt, it can quickly turn into a waterfall. Students have more options for learning, and can get more information, from a variety of sources. So the question for education becomes, how can we best accommodate that?

I would assert that a portfolio assessment of students’ learning is the best way. Just as an artist shows a portfolio to a prospective employer, students should be able to demonstrate learning from wherever they have learned — work, MOOCs, informal training, military service, volunteer service, and more — all in one place. And much of this learning will not involve a course at all.

If MOOCs are to be truly disruptive, they must link to competencies, credentials, degrees and/or ultimately jobs. Using a course-by-course, credit hour-by-credit hour approach to do this will not dramatically change the way people earn degrees. And dramatic change that allows for individual demonstrations of competencies is the only way to provide the education quality and agility necessary to truly recognize learning derived from free resources on the web. By focusing on competencies, we can align and accept learning experiences from everywhere.

Author Bio: Pamela Tate is president/CEO of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning.