What is best in learning: MOOCs, classroom or open university?

EUA has published its second Occasional Paper on the topic of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
Authored by Michael Gaebel, Director of the Higher Education Policy Unit at EUA, it also looks in detail at a number of issues related to the development of MOOCs that are directly relevant for universities.
The full paper can be downloaded here.
What is best in learning: MOOCs, classroom or open university?
What makes the debate complicated is that it combines two topics of discussion: MOOCs versus traditional face-to-face teaching, and MOOCs versus other forms of online learning. Hence, many of the arguments for and against MOOCs are actually not MOOCs-specific, but are related to the general debate regarding online learning.
Those who are sceptical about online education would identify MOOCs as the most recent and extreme representation of a type of learning provision that is not to be trusted. The classic conservative teacher’s position is that MOOCs cannot replace a teacher, learning has to be interactive, and does not allow to do laboratory experiments, clinical practice or medical simulation. However, criticism also comes from the open universities that find that MOOCs are just a resource – whereas the open universities provide real teaching with the necessary student support services, and award degrees (and hence are at least of equal quality to face-to-face teaching).
The question of whether online learning “is as good as” and whether it “replaces classroom teaching” has been the source of confrontation between proponents and opponents of online learning. Online opponents tend to describe the merits of face-to-face education in a nostalgic way that tends to ignore the realities of modern mass higher education. As MOOCs are announced as “the best education of the world accessible for anyone”, MOOC proponents may counter the arguments: How does studying a MOOC delivered by an inspired scholar from one of the world’s top institutions compare to sitting in an overcrowded and anonymous lecture hall in some unknown institution?
Besides the fact that this is – at least for the moment – hardly an alternative, as MOOCs generally do not award credits, and no degree: the point is of course that no sensible person would claim that online learning should replace all physical classroom teaching. It is clear that MOOCs and online learning forgo certain features that physical classroom teaching can offer, e.g. spontaneous interactivity, informal exchanges, cultural and social experiences in and outside the lecture hall – in particular in the case of young school leavers, for whom higher education coincides with living apart from their families, and becoming responsible for managing not only learning but also their lives. Decades of successful practice have proven that online higher education learning is possible and can be of high quality. It has also become clear that it has not replaced face-to-face instruction, but offers an alternative for learners who are not able and prefer not to attend a brick-and-mortar institution, and allows for an overall flexibility in teaching and learning.
So the discussion would be: what is the difference between a MOOC and other forms of online learning? Is it as an alternative to physical higher education teaching or a complement to it?. Download the full paper here.