clearly you are looking at this from the perspective of relatively wealthy, well educated member of the middle classes. Not everyone who did not attend a college is dumb. Some simply did not have the chance, and MOOCs offer them a chance to take up on knowledge they would otherwise not be able to acquire. Re the business models, let the MOOC providers figure that one out.

Had a similar experience with an MOOC on Big Data. It was a lot of gibberish with home work assignments in no relation to the course content. Quite simply dropped it (as in unregistered) as it was not worth my time. My take was that there are some professors who like their names to be associated with MOOCs without making the appropriate investment, which is understandable but not worth promoting.

Dude, check out Andrew Ng's Coursera course before ranting about lack of post-production. This is no longer a blackboard video-taped version of his class but one that has been specifically tailored towards an MOOC audience, and it very much follows the "tell, show, do" mantra: https://class.coursera.org/ml-003/lecture/preview