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Having done three courses with both Coursera and Udacity, I can honestly say that my biggest gripe with MOOCs is their emphasis on transmitting information sequentially, that is, via video lectures.

Seriously, what is wrong with putting up some nice readable-at-own-pace lecture material that is hyperlinked and indexed correctly so that I don't have to rewind videos if I missed something?

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Wouldn't you get lost in all the content? If you are free to read in any order you could get into a wikipedia-like situation where you keep opening new tabs non-stop and you lose track of the original thing you were reading about.

I generally agree with you though that having a SINGLE path through the course is too restrictive. It should be like in games: there is a main quest, but you can go on mini-quests on the side...

Professors take side quests too in their lectures. Sometimes they turn out to be quite lengthy.

They are not wrong. That said they can certainly be improved. I am looking at ways to improve the MOOCS structure. We are building a open course platform where anyone can teach. This is to get an understanding of the user problems.

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