Whether or not it is, I have yet to meet anyone who has done self study who has studied theory of computation, mutual exclusion, and that sort of stuff, month on end, like CS students do. Everyone seems to go straight to what is immediately useful, like the syntax of Objective C and so forth.
Also, the big technological leap allowing this was the Gutenberg printing press, not MOOCs and the like. Theoretically one just needs the textbooks and some other materials to self-study almost any topic. Yet people have still been going to universities for centuries. The movable type printing press was the major innovation for this, MOOCs have been relatively minor in comparison to this thus far, yet people have still gone to universities for the past few centuries.
> Also of critical importance, CS materials tend to be strongly represented in MOOCs
I did not find this to be the case. Some subjects we went into in class that I did not understand or wanted to look into more indepth, I would go online looking at Youtube videos, MOOCs, various materials etc. I was usually disappointed. If I was lucky I would get a poorly shot Youtube video of some professor with a thick foreign accent explaining the subject, often poorly.