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  I usually sign up for a bunch of classes just so I can 
  access the material at a later point when I have time or 
  when I'm interested.

How many of those classes have you done the work for?

Personally I find the synchronous model helps me complete the course, as it removes the temptation to put things off.

I think the synchronous model makes it easier to have small communities of students working through the same thing at the same time, helping each other.

On top of that it makes work of TA easier. Everyone works more or less on the same problem, be it programming assignment, quiz, etc. If there's a new question TA most probably remember what was in the last lectures and what are the common issues students are having this week.

Same for me.

I also find the assignments/exercises on the courses are first class and that's where a lot of the learning comes in especially when backed up by discussion forum activity from other students. Watching the videos on their own doesn't really appeal to me.

That may be but I personally find it extremely difficult to juggle my everyday working life with an online class. I would much rather download and watch a video lecture on the way to work.

You can totally do that. The courses are 'synchronous' in calendar spans of time, not in lectures being broadcast live.

I've signed up for over a dozen, finished three, learned significant amounts from, and done significant work in, about 5.

Just thought I'd add a data point in the opposite direction. I've signed up to two Coursera courses and two Udacity ones, and it's the Udacity ones I'm sticking with. I've finished Cryptography already and am 1/3 through learning python in CS1.

There is something dispiriting to me about a synchronous model. Once I can't keep up I tend to drop it as a failure, knowing there's no point in working through something that might be removed at any point. I also think it's the way I respond to the "don't break the chain" apps. Once life gets in the way and I do break the chain, I feel like a failure.

I'm quite happy to motivate myself however, so Udacity's model of giving the student however long they need, works perfectly.

Only terrible calculus teachers/class setups don't respond to student questions. Until you can do the same thing with a video there is going to be a gap. Traditional collage classes are generally based on the idea that ~1/3 of the time is synchronous learning in a classroom with a teacher 2/3 is self study. Have a 3 hour class expect 6+ hours of homework / projects on average. With that said, most classes don't spend a lot of time on questions, but they occur at the right time as in right in the middle of a lecture or right after it.

Presumably online videos could let you cut down on some class time, but even 1 hour after watching a video your going to forget some of your questions and much of the context of other questions you remember.

PS: If you took calculus in a setting of 500 people where you could not ask questions you still got ripped off even if there was a teacher in the room.

You can do the same with a video. You pause it, get on a relevant IRC channel or internet forum and ask "what does she mean by X at 23:51?" Or you Google the term or process you were confused about and find someone else's explanation (I have personally done this loads of times). Or you turn to the person you're watching it with and ask. Or you call up your study group on skype. Do those two latter things usually happen now? No, but they easily, easily could if this type of learning became mainstream.

Is having a professor there that you can ask immediately in the moment (and interrupt the lecture for the other students who understood the material) worth $1000 per credit hour?

Exactly this. I was almost offended when the course material was taken down or that I was 'locked out'; it seemed like it went against the whole idea of the online learning initiative. Quizzes and exams, okay, but learning materials should always be accessible!

I used the database course to supplement a database course that I was taking at the same time, and it was not just a stark difference in quality but also fantastic that I could pick the pieces of material that I needed to learn better and watch those lectures at my speed and how I wanted!

It's important to me that all course materials are available at the start of the course, and until at least a year after I take the course. Otherwise give me an easy way to download the course materials as a bundle to use in the future.

That's why I prefer Udacity's approach: they have the tradicional weekly classes when they open the course, but after that they're open enrolment. Start and finnish anytime you want.

Unfortunately, they have much less courses available, and they're all more or less computer science related.

I have taken classes at several top private and public universities and except in a few smaller, more advanced classes few questions were asked during the professor's lectures. And only some of those questions were helpful to the majority of the class. Having discussed this with many other students I believe this is typical, at least in US universities. (I have heard it is even worse in European and Asian universities where interruptions are discouraged. Is this true?)

I believe this is due to the constraints of the tradional class format. It is simply impossible to both cover the material and answer very many questions in typical length of a class. This means that if the class has more than a small number of students their questions simply cannot be answered during the lecture.

This is why many larger classes are divided into sections with labs run by grad students. These smaller forums are are better for discussion but their quality depends on finding grad students who are good at teaching. This is also fundamentally not scalable.

Online learning has the potential to break thru this limitation. The recent wave of MOOCs are a huge improvement over the online classes of just a few years ago. I believe there is still lots of room for improvement from both tailoring the class to the individual student (e.g fast vs slow pace) and A/B testing which has only just begun to be applied.

Interestingly some of these improvements can be applied to tradional classes some of which are already using online discussion forums and automated grading. A hybrid approach (in person lectures and discussions with full online support) will probably provide the best overall quality but will be more expensive than a pure online approach and not practical for people who can't physically attend classes.

Same with me - I signed up to loads of these things because I loved the idea. Turns out I didn't have time to actually do any of them, but it didn't cost me anything to sign up. I may at a later date search my inbox and access the material.

It's not really a retention problem if you offer something for free and tons of people have a look without making much commitment. Having said that, probably the only relevant statistics about these courses are how many people did them and completed the assignments/tests.

It's a reality that for most people, learning gets tedious after a while. The synchronous learning helps a lot of people drag themselves back into class when they're not really "feeling it."