Both are important. There are multiple questions to be asked.

For extremely self motivated people, MOOCS are a win, no doubt. Again, MOOCs are definitely better than no MOOCs.

But the promise was that MOOCs can just replace college to a large degree, because the content you get in college will be online. In that instance the question becomes "do MOOCs work for most people?" For what we'll call the "average" person, studies have shown that just isn't the case. Most people don't learn well from MOOCs, unfortunately.

Therefore what we're learning is that a non-trivial amount of what makes a college education successful is some combination of the following things that MOOCs don't have: external pressure, scheduled courses, due dates, a community of learners, a physical campus, etc.

As such, I view part of the next step to figure out which of those aspects MOOCs are missing that are vital to the mix in order to help average people learn the things they need to know. Traditional education just says all of them are necessary, but I'm not convinced that's the case.