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foobarqux
You forgot the most important weakness: The quality of the courses if often not very good. Even in the few cases when the lecture content is identical to that of the course given on campus the student assessments are not nearly as effective as learning aids.
webreac
The quality of the courses I have followed was excellent:

Coursera:Cryptography I - Dan Boneh

Coursera:Functional Programming Principles in Scala - Martin Odersky

Coursera:Compilers Alex Aiken

class2go.stanford.edu Introduction to Databases Jennifer Widom

foobarqux
I would say Cryptography and Compilers are among the best courses on Coursera (I can't speak for your other examples) and are not representative. The fact remains that even the best Coursera courses are not comparable to the education you would receive from similar courses taken on campus. One important reasons for that is the multiple choice or final answer quiz format is far inferior to long answer. For example, questions of the form "prove that" or "show that" which are staples of a rigorous course are essentially non-existent on Coursera for practical reasons. That would be fine if Coursera had somehow improved, in terms of learning quality, on that method of assessment but they have done the opposite.
webreac
I fully agree that the evaluation system can not assess reliably the level of the student. This may reduce the value of the diploma, but this does not affect the quality of what we can learn using these courses.
foobarqux
Questions are not merely an assessment tool but a learning aid. In fact doing problems is probably the most important aspect of learning.
aspinner
Although you may be correct, it seems too early to tell whether this is the case. There's bound to be some issues early on, as they are still so new. They will improve. I believe having that interaction with a professor is so valuable, and something that can't be easily replicated with the way MOOCs scale to the thousands of attendees.
ahmadss
This is solid content, but I was expecting a comparison of Coursera, udacity, KhanAcademy, and edX.

Additionally, may want to add a summary chart using one of the four variations to present a SWOT analysis --

http://i1-win.softpedia-static.com/screenshots/SWOT-ANALYSIS...

aspinner
I would actually like to see a comparison too. However, I have personally not taken courses at each (yet!), and having done so would be the best way to provide such feedback. Hopefully someone out there can share.