If you understand statistics you should understand the difference between anecdotal evidence and statistical data. You have one online course you're comparing to a handful of in-person courses you, personally, have taken.

There are hundreds of online courses and hundreds of thousands of in-person courses. You should know it's not a good idea to make inference about ALL MOOC's based on one example or ALL in-person courses based on a handful of classes.

If your statistics classes didn't teach you this concept, I'd say it was those classes that did a poor job.