Wow, Howler, that's some rant :-) I share some of your concerns.
But I think some of your irritation is misplaced. The first O in MOOC stands for Open, not for Open-source, and one of *my* bugbears is people conflating anything open with open-source. (For example, there are many, many occasions when open *standards* are essential but open *source* is unachievable: it's hard work to convince people that their explaining why you can't have the latter doesn't let them off providing the former.) MOOCS are open in the sense that anyone can enroll, without needing to convince anyone that they satisfy the prerequisites, for example. Who said it was supposed to be open source? (As a potential content provider, I can tell you I'm not open sourcing my content, although I've delightedly contributed to many open source projects over the years. Different thing.)
Also, I heard yesterday that the University of Washington has joined up with Coursera to offer online degrees, so you're out of date there :-)
