Interesting article, even though many of the 'facts' about MOOCs are largely based conjecture. There is little hard evidence that "MOOCs [...] have so far failed to live up to their promise. Largely because there is no formal system of accreditation, drop-out rates have been high."

From the research I did it comparing MOOCs to other online education offerings this is merely one of the contributing factors. IMHO the primary factor to the failure of MOOCs is that they are massive. Recent research, highlighted in the NYT, showed that the introduction style courses - the ones with 300-400 students - suffer from the same or similar problems. Once they took some of the poorest performers out of the lecture halls and put them in classes of ~30 they outperformed the students in the large classes.