You know that a coursera-taught team won a (non-academic) machine-learning competition, right? Knock-on articles about it made the rounds here a few weeks back.
The winners were a mechanical engineering student, an actuary, and an insurance risk analyst. This is all neat, but I was refering specifically to students w/ no education using these courses as a replacement for college.
Yes, as an add-on, I give it a huge Plus 1, but as a replacement, not yet. I'm not saying there is no hope, I'm saying it's not quite there yet.
