Even if they do succeed in that goal, I'm not sure the result of more researchers follows. Most of what they're targeting is replacing bachelor-level education, for one thing, not PhD-level. But more importantly, research is currently more constrained by funding and positions than availability of researchers. When either a university or Microsoft Research opens a position, they get hundreds of applicants. Even for postdoc jobs there are many more researchers than jobs. If several physics departments have to close, thousands of new students who've successfully taken physics MOOCs isn't going to make up for the closure of those research labs, from the perspective of progress in physics.

It's possible something else could replace those physics labs. Maybe Microsoft Research and similar non-academic labs will get larger, and expand out of computer science, more like the old Bell Labs? The U.S. could decide, alternately, that funding research is a priority, but doing it via hybrid educational/research institutions (the classic "research university") isn't going to work anymore, and choose to fund research-only institutions, e.g. bring the national labs back to the forefront. That's plausible, but I'm not sure there's political support for it.

I think currently it really comes down to the type of person enrolled in a MOOC. MOOC's certainly lower the barrier to accessing top level educational material, however that helps the people enrolled in them minimally if they are not motivated to fully take advantage. The comment made about MOOC's not having the same effect on people because they have no tuition is partially valid because of this.

My point is that with our current culture surrounding education, I don't believe that MOOCS will be powerful enough to topple academia. People just simply don't care enough about their education in America. I think that MOOCs would probably be much more effective in other countries, where education is not taken for granted.

However as time passes, and the culture around education shifts in the US, perhaps people would be more inclined to use MOOCS to their fullest potential.

  > If MOOCs deliver on the promise of delivering more
  > education to more people

It won't. It surely can make more education to be available to more people, but at the end there will be less people willing to use that oppurtunity.

Bold statement that has been proven wrong already. Khanacademy is a point against decreasing "willingness", as is Coursera. Most of their participants would not otherwise attend a formal course, either because of cost, living circumstances or some other factor. In fact, the "poaching" of students from traditional venues is limited.