Just want to note that, for many students, engaging with university programs will not be important for success, and trying harder to make this happen will not help either party.
Re: beta testing, do you disagree that a live teacher can improvise and respond to student needs in person more effectively than an online course? I suppose you can play “not all teachers,” but then this comes down largely to the school’s hiring and retention priorities, where the winning business move has just been to buy worse teaching and prop it up with respectable structures. If that’s the business move, then quality of untested online courses won’t matter. On the other hand, beta testing is a software industry procedure used for a standalone system that will be shipped to a large market where any confusion costs the producer in tech support, sales, etc. A traditional single course is not like this; it only has to work with 10–1000 students this semester and the creator is in the room helping it along every day. Wondering how you’d see this.
Re: employability, I checked all your links in this section and didn’t see anything on career services. In my experience, most students can’t code, are scared to try, and actually have no understanding of the internet (eg the client/server model). Digital natives are like fish who can’t recognize the water. If you ask them to make a professional self-representation (eg with Wix), they usually have little to say to the anonymous adult world. Perhaps you don’t mean career services or computer skills and really do only mean “critical thinking” and the other (very hard to identify) skills listed on your twitter.
I get your stake in this ecosystem, but personally side with resistance and skepticism to “new technology” because I have learn and taught with “new technology” and it usually gets in the way of developing the fundamental skills college ought teach. Blackboard being the easiest mark here.