Pedagogically, I'm a fan of a traditional semester which allows ample time for complex ideas to steep in the brain. There's room for making mistakes & recovery in a safe environment and invention along the pathways to learning. Even so, that doesn't mean we need to rigidly adhere to a formulaic structure for what can be construed as high quality teaching. Unfortunately - or fortunately - the debate as to what constitutes high quality teaching is old and unresolved even among professionals in the field.
Really, delivery mode (or duration) isn't altogether important, whereas understanding how to prove maximized ROI (outcomes of learning) in any format is the trick. I'm not sure counting numbers on any given MOOC via digital anaylitics applied in the back end - or even measurement of numbers of people who pass any given quiz or test in swift fashion - is going to suffice as proof whatever delivery mode works.
The irksome portion of this conversations rests in the connection between teaching and learning. That is, teaching can be fantastically optimized and superior, above all reproach, but learning hinges completely on the learner doing the learning. Simply put, you could be the greatest teacher since Euclid drawing diagrams in the sand, but if a learner/student is disinclined to learn, your ROI can still be zero.
As one wise man once said - not sure whom - "Education in advance of need, is folly," which may ultimately be the downfall of modern prerequisites, unless of course, it is the learner who understands the need to master whatever subject to achieve her or his own aims. Perhaps we should reset the whole conversation in terms of the separation between "wants" and "needs" and roll from there.
