So, taking apart a course and splitting it into modules might make a lot of sense, since it allows students to only learn what is most relevant to them at the time and be rewarded for their learning successes more easily and more often. Considering the horrendous dropout rates of most MOOC platforms this might be a very good way to incentivize students to "keep at it". However, this makes only sense if the individual modules are independent enough, so that students can learn about them individually (which, for many courses might not be the case).
For me, the concept of a "course" is mostly obsolete when delivering educational content online, and is probably mainly still in use because everyone understands what it means. It might even be a good example of skeuomorphism in this sense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph
I currently work on a (real-world) course platform that allows people to take "micro-courses" which can be completed in one single evening session and which (mostly) build upon each other. Like this, students can decide more easily which skills they want to learn, get results faster and spend less money on the course.
A concept which is similarly outdated (in my opiniion) is that of a scientific journal: These were created to (physically) group articles from a given field together so that they could be distributed to people working in that field. Digital distribution through the Internet makes this obsolete, since articles can be simply grouped using tags (or other meta-information). Like this, the concept of a "journal" gets replaced by that of a "view" on a group of articles that are similar in a given way, such as "all articles in the field of biophysics published last year", or "all articles [across all domains] that investigate sleep patterns". Using views instead of a journals is vastly superior (again, in my opinion) since it allows you to search for knowledge spanning different disciplines and fields of research.