[jmromer]

Compare D2L and Blackboard on one hand and the edX platform and Coursera on the other. Are they all LMSs? Absolutely. Is there some buzzword-mongering out there. Undoubtedly. But if you can't see (or, as a user, feel) any significant differences between those two groups of products, I'd suspect your faculties of discernment have been stunted.

Also, universities have failure and money-wasting baked into their institutional DNA. That they've failed at delivering content electronically (and almost everything else that's socially valuable) doesn't mean MOOCs can't be successful.