Henrik_w, those are some good points. The potential of MOOCs to deliver low cost education has been hurt somewhat by poor design choices. Classes have been simply "scaled up" by professors without much change to their structure. Without physical classroom interactions, learning online is much more difficult and needs a a collaborative support community to aid that process.

A few friends of mine from high school and I build a company called StudyCloud that plays in the space. To solve the issue of lackluster collaboration and low retention, our product builds a social community for each individual course, having other students and teachers there for support and encouragement. These individual social communities are integrated together for the student into a complete course overview. This allows a student to keep track of all their classes, seeing easily how well they're progressing at a moment's notice. This at-a-glance functionality is coupled with extensive notifications that help bring students back to the platform regularly to engage with one another more frequently than might typically occur.

We've been working on StudyCloud for over a year now, with most of our growth in the Midwest. We are working with a few universities on hybrid course design to further improve not only the product but best practices for teachers. I would be happy to share more if you interested.

www.mystudycloud.com