> Quite literally they were PDF scans of homework, a PDF syllabus, instructions on what to do (what chapters to read, when to submit stuff etc.) and power point slides. That was it. If you were lucky, you got video taped lectures from in-person classes.

If it's good enough for in-class, why is this approach insufficient for online? I actually prefer this exact setup when taking college classes online. I can rewatch portions of the lectures if necessary, and there's not a bunch of people asking disruptive questions.

> There is a lot of potential with interactive media using a computer that never gets applied to these online courses because of the technical limitations of teachers and related support staff

I don't feel much of these types of things have been superior to books.

At the same time online is shit for direct interpersonal communication, so that's the strongest tool teaching has out the window.

The best you can get online is one on one video calls, and while not too much worse compared to real face to face conversations, you will be hard pressed to get live video to web scale.

Discussion forums are one part of MOOCs that basically don't work at all. For technical courses that roll out on a schedule (which are probably not as common any longer), they're vaguely useful for platform issues and maybe some points of particularly common confusion. But they're swamped with people who are clearly way out of their depth, e.g. have no idea how to even begin to setup a required programming environment on their system.

From there, it descends into the absolute dumpster fire that is any sort of real discussion around less technical topics.

Some of the early versions of online courses like OCW weren't actually intended to be used "out of the box" as courses though. They were explicitly intended to be resources that teachers could use and adapt to create courses tailored to the needs of a group of students. (I'm not sure how much actual cross-pollination there was, but OCW would seem to have grown out of some of the same thinking as One Laptop per Child.)

As it turned out, OCW ended up overshadowed by the various straight to consumer MOOCs.