The evidence I've seen suggests the opposite: the self-motivated natural autodidacts that do well in MOOCs would do well in nearly any educational setting, wher

The evidence I've seen suggests the opposite: the self-motivated natural autodidacts that do well in MOOCs would do well in nearly any educational setting, whereas the many people who need more scaffolding, support, and personal instruction do much, much worse. Teachers do add an extraordinary amount of value: if what you're doing can be summed up as a reading list and lecture series, rather than a conversational interaction and personal attention, then it isn't actually adding a whole lot of value to the instructional setting. The problem is that while university teachers add can add huge amount of value, their profession makes actual teaching a chore to be foisted off on graduate students and adjuncts rather than a goal, in favor of really dubious publication.