"Their progress also was comparable to what some MIT students showed when they were required to take the introductory course on campus as a remedial measure." Could this praise be any more faint?
Here is the lead sentence of the story: So how many of them "stuck with the class" ? So the MOOC worked -- assuming that you focus on the 6% of students that actually completed it, and ignore the 94% who dropped out.
Something that one would learn in a research methods or statistics course is that attrition can matter. Those who stay with a program can be fundamentally different from those who dropped out.