Many courses on Coursera, edX and similar sites are supervised while they are live. If you enroll to a "live" MOOC you actually get most of it, as well as interaction with other students. If you go trough an archived course you don't really get it and that's when the "MOOC" turns from a course to an information source. Considering that "MOOC's" are supposed to be an online resource i don't see how an in-person supervision can be achieved regardless of the fees. This is again an issue of miss managing expectations, what you describe amounts to an open university and not an online course. Open Uni's do offer everything from educational advisers to pre-arranged study groups and access to teachers and TA's but they also come at a cost ranging from anywhere from 50% to 200% of the normal cost of a degree. People drop out of anything and while MOOC's have a much higher drop out rate than normal education it has much less to do with what they offer and more to do with how people treat and what they expect from them in the first place. In the course of my job i actually have taken quite a few of them when i needed to tackle projects with an unfamiliar scope for example I've taken several "economics" classes when i had to do a project regarding stock and high frequency trading. I'm an information security consultant, and although i am quite familiar with traditional finance systems used for banking, i didn't have enough knowledge of how stock trading and HFT works to be able to truly identify critical issue with such systems (mainly in regards to discovering logic flaws, race conditions and similar issues). So I've found 3 courses i thought would give me enough information and invested the time needed in them. I did "drop" 2 of them but just because they went too deep into economical theories which wasn't what i needed. But i did complete one of them until the end and learned quite a bit from it about how modern day commodity trading works. But I've also treated the "MOOC" as i would any other course I've started at 9 am, finished at 5-6pm and actually structured it like if i were at school or at working (which technically I was). People who just consume online courses when they get bored over the weekends or when they have their 2am "life changing resolutions" will never be able to get anything out of them even with all the guidance in the world. A coach or an adviser will not make any one capable of learning on a bus or at 11pm after a full work day, a gym and a bar visit. There is a reason why night school has higher drop rates than normal school and it's because it's harder. People need energy and the ability to focus on education otherwise it's just a waste of time. And if you sitting in a class from 6-9 is borderline possible for education than what good will it be when you consume it on a tablet while trying not to make eye contact on the train?