I am always amazed when people make comments like this:

"The results of the University of Texas at Austin’s first full-semester foray into massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are in."

"Professor Michael Webber’s “Energy 101,” which had an enrollment that peaked at around 44,000 students, had 5,000 receive a certificate of completion — about 13 percent of the roughly 38,000 students who ultimately participated."

So let's unpack this a bit. Professor Webber created a class called "Energy 101" and processed 5,000 students through it to completion. Your typical 100 level undergraduate class might have anywhere from 50 to 200 students in it.

UT Austin this year had 8690 freshman total.

So assuming the largest possible class of 200, this professor in one semester taught the equivalent of 25 semesters of 200 student classes, in one semester.

Why should we care that 32,000 people signed up and then said "Woah, really don't have the time to commit to this right now?"

It is one thing to move to a campus dorm and start studying some topic. It is quite another to click a few links on a web page and say, "Yeah, that could be an interesting class."