That is, even if what you say about it is true, Sunpower, that doesn't mean that Julia didn't put in a lot of late nights and break a real sweat in trying to reach some conclusions, nor does it mean that everything published as research is of high quality or really adding anything to the body of "knowledge" generally. Anyway, there are universities in the UK that explicitly seperate research programs from "taught courses" (again, I'd need to check which ones exactly), so even if you did attend classes and wrote a quasi-dissertation, it wouldn't make much difference beyond the immediate world of you and your tutors.
I guess that ideally, we would all do residential courses, learn and discuss a lot, have a chance to do a bit of research, write a conclusive "dissertation" even if it wasn't quite going to change the world, and generally have a good time and make some useful academic contacts...but if, at the end of it, we are just going to be more or less just teaching English conversation (and not even stylistics) in some Japanese or Korean university (for example), what ultimately is the point of it? To broaden just our minds (and empty our wallets)?
Let's not delude ourselves here, most qualifications are just to give employers that extra little bit of confidence in you prior to hiring, and they undoubtedly make a lot of money for the institutions offering them, even when their quality and therefore their value for money is reasonably high. We are "buying" academic friendship and temporary endorsement, but we are not really going to become "respected" academics ourselves through doing this kind of course (that is, I suspect that most academics excelled in their area right from undergraduate level, and have never had to leave academia to scratch a living in the "real" world - not that e.g. securing funding for research isn't hard work!).
I presume(d) that Julia and others would have the intelligence to not include on their CV the jobs they were doing whilst completing their distance degree, if lying about its "residential, taught, ?research" nature was indeed what they'd decide they'd need to do to get a job, and I don't think many employers spend time perusing every page of your passport if you present them with the necessary pages (make photocopies to give to them!) and make it clear you don't want to let it out of your sight.
