Are people getting hired based on a resume of a MOOC education? Do you know anyone who really learned a subject by taking a MOOC? If so, that's fantastic.
1. Employers completely ignore them.
2. The vast majority of courses are not very good - poor preparation, bad lecturing, not well thought out course design. A small number of courses (mostly those based on existing courses at top universities) are very good. I think that this actually reflects the university experience in general.
I think if there is a problem with MOOCs, it is purely one of expectation. Of course there isn't some magical "if you MOOC it they will learn" effect. Of course people aren't getting hired because of putting a few classes on their resume. But both of these things are true of college education as well. You can't force people to learn, you can only give them the opportunity. Nobody hires on the basis of individual college courses either. It will be interesting to see if the "degree program" equivalents that the MOOCs are trying will be successful, but it's too early to tell.
But ignoring all that, there are now hundreds of opportunities for motivated individuals to learn about an enormous breadth of topics completely for free, with lots of good lecture videos, lecture notes, exercises, projects, and peer discussion. This really can't be anything but a really great thing.
As it stands, I think the people that (1) understand the topic well, and (2) are getting jobs are also people that take that understanding and have something to show for it. It's not enough to say that you learned code through Codecademy, you do need to build something of your own to show in order to be employable. I think that's the case even with traditional education: it's not enough to simply have a CS degree, but something to show for it as well.
I've done quite a few MOOC courses. The best courses demonstrate what I believe the future of higher education should be. They're better than anything I've at an accredited university. Of course, it bears noting that I'm dealing with courses at a public university versus MOOCs by the likes of MIT and Stanford.
>'Do you know anyone who really learned a subject by taking a MOOC?'
No, but I see no reason it couldn't happen. If the best courses I've taken were stacked together and extended to half a dozen semesters of escalating content I think they'd produce formidable results.
At a conference I was at, one of the speakers claimed that a disproportionate number of the successful students in the group they were studying not only had some college, but had actually finished college and had a degree (though not always in the same area). It'd be nice to see some more solid stats on that. Their interpretation was that where MOOCs are most successful, so far, is as "continuing education" for people who already finished conventional higher education. Those people can use MOOCs to keep up to speed in their field, or broaden by taking a few courses in other fields that they didn't get a chance to study at school.