What's surprising is that people who've been professors for 18 years at Stanford or frickin heads of a Ivy League university didn't realize this until 5 more years into the business side of education. Shows how narrow academic's wheelhouse is.
everyone realized you go to college for the rubber stamp.
* Face-to-face contact with professors.
* Face-to-face contact with classmates, with the possibility of forming in-person study groups and suchlike.
* A structure to help your self-discipline; lectures follow a strict schedule so you don't fall behind, thinking "I'll watch it later", then never get caught up.
* An environment where your peers are doing the same thing you are - rather than being the one guy in your office who watches coursera videos at lunchtime, you see hundreds of your fellow students every day.
* A widely understood and non-stigmatised social status when pursued full time. You're not "unemployed for 4 years and not even looking for a job" a.k.a. lazy freeloader. You're a "student" a.k.a. future member of the middle class.
* Clubs and societies where you can make friends. Friends who are close to your age, with similar backgrounds to yours, and with similar interests to you, and who are looking for new friends at the same time you are.
* Networking opportunities (at least if you're doing an MBA or something where other people want to network)
* Parties full of nice young people of your preferred gender.
* Etc etc
Now granted, the rubber stamp is important too, but to say college is only a rubber stamp is IMHO an over-simplification for a lot of people's college experiences.
But these are neither VC-sized opportunities nor anything especially disruptive.
Leaving aside a few useful tools like online code evaluators, MOOCs largely solved a problem that was long-ago solved. Namely, access to quality broadcast-style lectures and other course content. At the same time, peer interactions and any genuine coaching pretty much didn't work with MOOCs.
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.
My understanding is that a lot of schools already videotape their big lectures and many students just watch them online while doing study groups, going to recitations, working on problem sets, etc. more or less like they always have.
I agree that Coursera has it's problems, with the insistence to stick to class start and end dates as one example.
But to extrapolate that therefore online learning doesn't work as a medium is absurd.
[0]: https://learner.coursera.help/hc/en-us/articles/208279866
[1]: https://learner.coursera.help/hc/en-us/articles/208279776
However, that Coursera certifications would be valued (presumably by employers) on a mass scale was always an aspiration without an awful lot of evidence behind it. (Yes, there are certifications that people pay a lot of money for but they're essentially all focused on a very specific set of skills and tied into some sort of ongoing program.)
No, at the beginning another model was seriously discussed: Giving employers access to people who love to learn new things on their own. Cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311744
> the companies you describe are in such high demand by applicants that they have more qualified applicants than slots to fill
That applies to every company you named. It's great that you managed to get one of those slots. There are plenty of people who don't, though, and they can end up in a much worse position if they spend their time on learning that the majority of companies don't recognize.
The issue is that if all MOOCs were was another way to view lectures and do some exercises in an online setting for free/cheap, they wouldn't have been viewed with any particular excitement. But that's pretty much what they turned out to be.
I'm sure they've been a useful way of learning for some. But they haven't fundamentally changed anything.