[viscanti]

'Radically Superior' could mean equal quality of education for:

1) Free (or nearly free) 2) Open to anyone 3) flexible to fit anyone's schedule 4) Easier to show the actual work completed (because there is a digital copy).

Generally, any student who needed special considerations for any of the above (a likely non-trivial amount of students), they had to compromise on the quality of education. For those students, I'd argue that it a significant improvement.

[dalke]

I am pleased to see an increasing uptake in mass higher education, except like the OP I think we have confused liberal education with job training. But it would be unwise to ignore the history of distance learning, which started with correspondence colleges in the 1800s. Certainly anything which was done by post can be done now by computer, so I have no doubt that MOOCs can work. The question is how judge if they are "radically superior".

California used to have (1). The GI bill also meant (1) for many veterans. Germany, Sweden, and some other countries still have (1). Which makes it easy to judge if current US universities are radically inferior to tuition-free universities. The Open University in the UK is a decades old example of (2) and (3), though not (1).

It's therefore hard for me to accept that MOOCs are significantly more radical and superior than existing systems which already incorporate most of the points that are supposed to make it radical and superior.

And, (4) Seriously? What, some employer is going to come and insist seeing my individual assignments for partial differential equations before hiring me? And read through my essays for sociology class? And my term papers for introductory philosophy? Embrace the Panopticon!

For that matter, my wife's college (she takes online courses) is focused on team projects, so most of her assignments are done with 2-3 other people. How is the outside world supposed to figure out which part is hers? How much time are they willing to spend to disentangle this?

And finally, if this were useful then a pen-and-paper correspondence college could add a small surcharge per course to hire someone to scan incoming mail and put it in a file for future reference. That that hasn't happened, nor that there's been a call for it, suggests that it isn't so useful.