Most of the courses are, at least currently, not the quality of those served by a good conventional institution. Moreover the multiple-choice and/or keep-trying grading format makes assessment, even self-assessment, challenging.
> And in a vote of confidence in the form, students in both [of two Coursera courses] overwhelmingly endorsed the quality of the course: 63 percent who completed Dr. Agarwal’s course as well as a similar one on campus found the MOOC better; 36 percent found it comparable; 1 percent, worse.
I'd say that the quality of MOOCs vary, but definitely no more than the quality of courses at a formal institution.
Really, people who spend their time, received some notion of credit for completing a class, and then praise it for quality represent the textbook case of biased opinion.
This is generally true. I think I learned a lot in the Scala course, but it would be nice to have a human look at the code at some point. And the assignments were more or less fill-in-the-blank.
OTOH, this language course http://spanishmooc.com/ looks potentially as good or better than traditional ones. It seems like language courses over the Internet with native speakers could be higher quality and competitively priced with software solutions.
