Interesting and challenging article about most current online education offerings. It would be interesting to see if the problems of maintaining engagement in a MOOC were at least partly due to students realizing that some or all of the requirements for authentic understanding were not being met.

As I understand it, there is a different MOOC philosophy that has not gained much support (probably because it's much harder to scale) - the connectionist approach. Perhaps that would support some of the requirements.

(PS: interesting that many of the comments here try to rise to the ice-cube challenge...)