Where am I in this debate? You can find out about it in this interview, written by Francis Gagnon, one of the participants in my first intro to infographics and data visualization massive online course. It's almost all in there.
To summarize: I don't think that online education and MOOCs will replace traditional degrees soon. They can't. They are a different kind of educational experience, which may nicely complement what we already have. That's why I prefer to label my own "course" as a workshop. It works as an introduction to the core concepts of what I teach with much more depth at the University of Miami. But I also fear that, as newspaper managers did when they faced the Internet, college administrators will use that argument as an excuse to become wishfully ignorant of an environment that can start mutating rapidly and unpredictably. We humans suck at forecasting and the fact that things have remained the same for ages doesn't mean that they won't suddenly change in a short time. That's what Nassim Nicholas Taleb has called the turkey problem.