Think of online learning and platforms to create great online course material not as making teachers obsolete, but as tools for teachers, which will enable them to do a lot more than they could previously with the time they had. [...] Blogging sites and online news did not make journalists obsolete, rather created 10 million journalists, while making news much more interactive and exciting. In much the same manner, online learning has the potential to transform education.
Agarwal liked that line so much, he used it in the answer to two questions about the future of lecturers. But let's be real here. Online news has not been good for journalists. Arguably it has been good for the public in terms of access to journalism or journalism quality; these are debatable notions that I don't want to get into.
But without a doubt journalists have been layed off in droves, salaries have fallen, and careers especially at the low end have ended. Just look at what has happened to local newspapers. Even the premier papers like the NYT have fallen on hard times.
So maybe MOOCs are a good idea. Maybe they'll make education more accessible, cheaper, meritocratic, higher quality, etc. Let's talk about that. But let us not pretend that it isn't very bad news for all but the very top tier of instructors, and perhaps even bad news for them. Pointing this out is not a sufficient argument against MOOCs. All sorts of job fields have been made obsolete by technology.
I dislike the spin of pretending this is good news for instructors though.