[ghaff]

I'm not sure it was so much "guaranteed a job at the end of this series of courses." But I do think that there was a suggestion, hope, even promise that MOOCs could replace traditional classroom education and degrees under some circumstances.

The issue is that, to a large degree, they mostly solved the easy thing. Making videos of university lectures widely available isn't hard. Neither is making other broadcast aspects of the syllabus available (e.g. in MIT OCW). A lot of good material was made available through Coursera and edX. But, frankly, a Wordpress blog with embedded videos and links would have worked nearly as well for a lot of this material.

Yes, CS somewhat uniquely benefits from the opportunity to reasonably evaluate code written for problem sets. But, for the most part, evaluation is at the multiple choice level.