I don't take it personally at all. I see your point and fully understand it. I consider someone to be an expert at something when they 'know what they don't kno

I don't take it personally at all. I see your point and fully understand it. I consider someone to be an expert at something when they 'know what they don't know'. But, what you are saying isn't limited to MOOCs. When you are learning on your own to fully understand something, you don't let magic fly. When I learned my first programming language I didn't allow myself to use any libraries at all. I made myself make everything from scratch so I knew what every moving piece was doing. In my opinion, the onus is on the student. I work with plenty of devs who have CS degrees from top schools who will look for a library to do something that can be implemented with a line or two or code if they would take a few minutes to learn about it. Sometimes it's laziness, sometimes they don't seem to have the ability to learn something without it being force fed to them. I've also had problems with some of them during code reviews because they don't know what they don't know, and in their case they have a piece of paper that says they are experts so they refuse to listen and learn. These courses are far from perfect, but they are a stepping stone for people who have a burning desire to learn. It's 3:30am where I am. I've been working on an algorithms class since I got home from work at 6pm. (with occasional HN breaks). I'll get a few hours of sleep and go to work. This has been my life for almost a year. To say I lack any expertise at this point is a little silly. I have nothing but a HS diploma and I'm keeping up with MIT open courseware. I would say they are doing something right. And I think that going from tech support to developer is a little more than a self-assessment.