I've taken 3 classes thru coursera and put the time and effort into finishing 2 of them all from the comfort of my living room couch. As you can imagine, i think online learning is great and opens up educational opportunities to people that might not otherwise have them. For example, a course on sustainability had people in remote parts of mongolia participating. I may be naive but who thought they had internet access there? When there is such a diversity of backgrounds participating in a class it truly brings a unique, global perspective to learning that you dont get when sitting in a classroom.
I'm signed up to take a class on computational neuroscience and another on greenness of products that both start in Jan. I work full time and have 2 young kids so being able to learn about an entirely new topic or area that was available when I was an undergrad or wouldnt normally have access to is a huge thing for me. The online format takes some getting used in the beginning but the professors all seem to be fairly good. I checked them out in rate my prof. Since it's free, there really is no risk associated with it and the best part is that I'm not going into debt to learn something new.