I'm a college student and I wish more schools offered a tracking system like this. More free form and intense. Let me focus on something, give it my all and learn in groups. I know a fair bit of literature courses and history courses could not work like this (easily) but I do see the ability for a lot of the college landscape to be more enjoyable class-focus-intensity wise. I don't know of anybody who likes to waste their time doing something they don't like.

High-intensity week-long courses on topics that you choose sounds ideal. It reminds me of ArsDigita University, where the course of study was sequential and intensive, with most courses lasting one month.

You're assuming there's a demand for learning.

Yes, clearly there's no "demand for learning", that's why Khan Academy is about to go out of business and traditional universities have refused to offer high-quality, free online learning.

Yep, as long as it's free. I can't think of many people who pay much to learn stuff, outside of traditional colleges. You might pay a few hundred to go to a conference, but this is much less than you pay to get a degree.

There IS demand for learning then, we seem to agree on that despite your original post.

That's the exact need things like Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseWare, Codecademy and Udacity are addressing.