Out of all the hyped fads on HN a decade ago, MOOCs have fallen even harder than drone startups. What happened to disrupting the overpriced hollow credentialism of higher education?
MOOCs kind of demonstrated that it isn't so hollow, even if just as a filtering function for capable people. Anyone can get the curriculum taught at MIT or Yale now and yet there has been no massive upskilling in the world, nor are there tons of people who attribute MOOCs for tremendous success. Even the ads for the MOOCs now are competing more with DeVry Or U of Phoenix instead of any serious institute of higher education.
The expectation vs reality seems reminiscent of earlier utopian ideas about the web itself and how instant access to all knowledge would change humanity.
I think it did change humanity. People are howling and shouting more. Fake news, infomercials are providing all the information to humanity which gatekeepers like college/universities/libraries didn't really provide. Wealth is getting concentrated among people who promote those platforms and work there.
A lot of people assumed that once you provided a way to bypass the admission and tuition gates, there was no reason they too couldn't be as successful as the average Stanford or MIT grad. In practice, it had very little impact.