I recently signed up for a Coursera mooc. This was at the general suggestion of my eldest daughter and I was glad she did it. I chose Plagues, Witches and War which was about historical fiction, something I really like. This was a valuable experience for two main reasons. One, I learned a lot about a genre I love, specifically historical detective novels. And two, I learned a lot about being an online student, specifically how it feels and how these feelings motivate the student to complete the course.
With few exceptions, most of my time spent on the course, I felt alone, on the outside. Sometimes this was fine and others, it presented an obstacle to learning. When was it successful? When the teaching did not assume too much about me. The right balance is difficult but not impossible to achieve.
I felt very disinclined to do the course readings relying entirely for my learning on the audio-video material. Nevertheless, I feel I learned a lot and was able to enjoy all the AV content. From this point of view, I did not find the course to be aligned assuming the teacher intended that his students read the books.
While I was happy that I did well on the quizzes (the only assessment), I found them to test only low level skills.