MOOCs could be disastrous for students and professors
slate.com
slate.com
If you want to experiment on a subject in a 30 person live class, the financial and opportunity cost (taking someone else's seat) is high. In a MOOC it's a non issue.
I also think that it's not the current $2700/course teachers that have to be afraid. MOOCs still will require some aspect of human intervention for grading, and there will still be some in-person coursework needed. The people who should be nervous are the current Phd students who want to be tenure track. Future tenure track spots will disappear for everyone who isn't a rock star researcher.
I view the future model as "Anything with an existing body of knowledge will go the way of MOOCs, and live discussion classes will be smaller and focused on subjects that require more debate." This is actually good for the humanities.
Self-education is a different model. It's more fault-tolerant. You fail (as in, don't understand) about 30-50% of the stuff you try-- at least, that's my noncomprehension/loss-of-interest rate when I attack a random-ass paper-- but that's okay, because it just means you fill up the prerequisites and get back to it.
MOOCs are making self-education much easier. With lectures split up into 5- to 10-minute pieces (that's good and bad) you can watch them on the train or even at work. I feel like one place where MOOCs are really going to kill is in corporate training; companies will realize that MOOCs provide resources and (for a fee) people to build their in-house "here's how you use our shit" tutorials better than what's out there in most places. Of course, that will also make it easier for people to use MOOCs at work; I like that, but I'm not sure it's what typical corporate managers want.
College education is based on a different model with a known, fairly static prerequisite graph and a low tolerance of failure-- but failure (even defined as a grade of D or F, and C for in-major) is also pretty rare. College is this packed-tight model (designed for efficiency in time by providing an immersive community) where you get (in theory) what'd be 8-12 years of self-education in 130 weeks spread out over 4 years.
However, the world changes fast enough that this "learn, then earn" model doesn't make any sense. Education has to be more interleaved than it used to be.
Also, 18 years old used to be an adult; but our culture is so incoherent and (I can't find a values-neutral word for it) chaotic that adulthood now is about 24-27. I think college was an extremely efficient educational process when it was full of adults; but now it's full of kids, not because admissions changed but because society did.