A lot of people supported edX with time and money, including much of the early team and course contributors, based on this lie. Coursera was at least honest about it.
Aside from that, most Harvard online courses have amazing production value (fully staffed video teams), and preciously little learning value. That's reflected in the hiring too. How many Harvard professors care about teaching-and-learning, much less online.
I predict ASU, SNHU, Georgia Tech, and other schools which try to do online well will eventually eat Harvard's lunch unless something changes. With "eventually" being 50-100 years, since that's how long university reputations last :)
That's lots of time for even a Harvard to change.
Somewhat related, Amherst is bringing back 60% of students; Reed wants all back, but is limiting to one student per dorm room (and is encouraging nearby apartments for others.)
Bottom line, it seems the small liberal arts schools (less than 5,000 students or so) are bringing students back. The big unis (Harvard, Stanford, Cal), not so much.
Virtually everyone at edX who was mission-driven left in the great purge of 2017 (or was it 16? or 18? I might be off by a year). More than a third of the organization, including the author of the platform, left around that time.
The CEO walked around, publicly announcing he'd switch to paid models as soon as Coursera did. If that's not an attempt at market collusion, I don't know what is.
Additionally despite being an online platform that ostensibly allows you to work on your own schedule, they still cut off access after some arbitrarily predetermined amount of time and there's nothing you can do to extend it. Again, for many courses, you can't even pay bec they're archived. the only way to finish the course to create a new account.