As a GA Tech student for two years now (GA Tech's OMSCS program is all MOOCS), MOOCS are generally horrible ways to actually teach.

-I have no idea why anyone would have anxiety about being in class, I don't think that's a common problem.

-There's less focus in online classes because now you have to manage all the different ways you have to communicate with everyone, official and unofficial, in the hopes you can get enough interaction to slog your way through the horribly written assignments and figure out what they actually want you to do.

-There's essentially zero communication with teachers -- they're almost totally absent, communication with other students can be helpful, or not, and you don't always know. There are typically two or three TAs for up to 600 students, so any kind of focused interaction with a TA is almost unheard of, and even if you do get that their level of expertise is often in question.

-autograders work well for some very defined sorts of problems, but they don't work at all for most workflows. The TAs, in my experience, spend most of their limited time fixing autograder screwups.

> I have no idea why anyone would have anxiety about being in class, I don't think that's a common problem.

Like 1 in 5 college students[1], I have a diagnosed anxiety disorder. I frequently have anxiety in class, especially before the professor starts talking and is just scanning the room and occasionally making eye contact with me, or if I'm asked to interact with other students.

That said, I still think that MOOCs aren't remotely comparable to real college classes.

[1] pg. 16 - https://www.acha.org/documents/ncha/NCHA-II_Spring_2018_Refe...

You didn't claim they weren't, but I just want to point out how each of those points is very, very subjective. For me:

- I'd much rather be in-person, where I can better gauge what others are communicating and more readily have two-way communication about the material.

- I'm way less focused when on my own computer, on my own time.

- I find I communicate way less purely online than I would in-person.

- Automatic grading sucks, especially for programming, as it can only really test inputs and outputs, and misses a ton of nuance. I want to also know if my code sucks, regardless of it producing the correct output or not.

The main thing MOOCs do well is a solved problem with or without MOOCs--namely lecture videos.

Discussion boards are mostly a tire fire; they're mostly useful for dealing with platform problems. They can probably be better when you restrict access to a qualified class but they don't really scale.

>Automatic grading sucks, especially for programming

I'd probably say automatic grading sucks, "even for programming." At least automatic grading can evaluate outputs of non-trivial programs. Programming is one of the few areas where autograding works for non-trivial, not multiple choice, questions.

I concur with boards being useless in general. It's too slow, not predictable. That's why I liked the moocs IRC channels. It was a live place where we could discuss things and resolves issues quickly.