I'm very surprised that it sounds like he used his Udacity course as the material for the actual Stanford course. That's a huge disservice to Stanford students.

Online education is going to take time to develop. If the courses are too difficult, very few people would make it through them. At this stage, they need the idea to catch on more than anything else. Once it catches on and they can establish legitimacy (i.e. being able to hand out degrees or find people jobs), then it'll be easier to convince prospective students to deal with more challenging material. It's a balancing act.