New article today.  Basically says students need more hand-holding than online courses give; much more in the case of community college students and possibly less for graduate students.  I'm surprised it's not obvious.  The value proposition of having a professor and a student actually interact is expanded, not reduced when the main conduit for information to the student is a massively open online course (MOOC) rather than a printed textbook.
What this really means is that the infrastructure that was built around the value-adding professor-student interaction over the past 3,000 or so years is becoming more and more precarious, less and less unassailable, with this new technology.  This to me seems too obvious. What is less obvious is how we arrived at having such a surfeit of rent-consuming accouterments that have come to surround the interaction and which have also come to define the world's perception of a university.  I can name a few headings under which to explore this question - the question of "Why?" 

1. Benign influences:
1. Local optimization
2. Trust and reputation
3. Network effects
2. Malign:
1. Bureaucratic self-preservation
2. statistical stereotyping
3. confirmation bias.

I'll expand on these in future posts.

Students seek professors. The spend a few years doing whatever it is professors and students do. At the end, the professor pronounced the student "graduated". Society at large recognizes the value of the student who has had this experience. After several gradations of graduation, the student might decide to pursue the path pf becoming a professor too. Or not.

So underneath all the Latin and posturing, there really is a continuous arc from from Pythagoras and his order or Plato and his academy, to massively online courses, for profit colleges, and Ivy Leagues. Everything that has happened in between can be described as addition of third parties to the interaction of professor and student. This is necessary when it is a value multiplier. Three professors and a secretary can serve more students than four professors.  But how does the process end?