The path forward will be made by the people who take these classes succeeding at various projects. Much like traditional schools increase their reputation via the achievements of their alumni, so will the MOOCs. You're seeing some success stories already, but wait until someone high profile credits their success to what they learned at Coursera or Udacity.

On another front, the first traditional school has decided to award credit for a Udacity class, if the student takes a proctored test. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/07/education/colorado-state-t...

We're just about a year out from that first Thrun/Norvig Stanford AI class. Things have moved very quickly when you put it in that perspective.