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>their credentials are not trustworthy because anyone can easily cheat their tests.

One issue is that, especially in the context of a standardized online course, credentialing arguably runs somewhat counter to educational value. For example, organizations that offer technical certifications have to struggle with how specific to make their feedback so that someone who fails doesn't just look up the specific things they got wrong on a test and retake it. (Without materially changing their overall mastery of the material.)

>The other elephant in the room is that the rigor of their online courses.

I'm not sure that's universally true given in-depth problem sets, reading, etc. that a student dutifully works through. Of course, many will not and evaluation/feedback becomes more difficult as you move away from lecture formats and material that is amenable to computerized grading and evaluation.

But, as you suggest, most people are not really looking to spend the time they would need to in order to work through an MIT or Stanford curriculum, if indeed they are practically able to do so.

>Education is not a one size fits all

I agree with this.

>The difficulty (proxied by the reputation of the school) of the same courses vary wildly and dramatically, as does workload, peer support, TA support, exams, and even the pace and how the final grade is curved.

This doesn't sound like education to me, but a system of schooling composed of these factors with varying weights of assumed importance that most people in a society choose/blindly accept to be the one and only equivalent to an education (and all the ills that come from this assumption).

The projects are certainly as rigorous anything you will get in any undergrad degree. The difference is the grading system. With Udacity, you have to hit every deliverable as if it were a paid contract, but you can keep going 'till you hit them all, since there's no deadline. In college, there's a deadline, but you can skip that one thing you couldn't quite get working, and still move on with a 'B', etc.

Deadlines matter a lot in increasing difficult (but also helps with efficiency). Especially when compounded with multiple courses.

I think that's true. Deadlines do have some pedagogical value. When I did Udacity, it was pay by month, so there was a sense of time pressure in that every extra month burned cash. I think they switched to the flat fee now because too many people were blazing through in 2-4 months which is too bad because it took out the admittedly low pressure time aspect of the program.