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I think one of the inherent flaws of online education is that it's hard to produce physical results, which is especially important for engineers. MIT's motto is mens et manus, and it's a motto that's more rooted in reality than most universities'. As an undergraduate at MIT I certainly get the feeling that MIT as a community is genuinely dedicated to teaching its students how to "use their hands" -- that is, create real-life, physical projects and to think about how things exist in the real world. I think it's incredibly important to focus on physical reality while you're learning, especially in the sciences and engineering -- science education is more effective with doing labs; engineering education is more effective with creating projects, etc. This makes me leery of online learning, because by its very nature it's so abstracted. You can't work on your own projects in real life and get meaningful feedback on it from a fellow-student thousands of miles away, because so much of building things comes from being able to actually see/touch them, etc. In other words, online education is (potentially) great for the "mens" side of things, but not so much for the "manus" side.
An MIT education means that you can do things, instead of just think about them, and I think that almost definitely takes real-life people, and certainly takes physical resources. The only way I can think of starting to making "an MIT education" more accessible is distributing some type of "kits" with actual materials, like how some people distribute circuit design kits so that people who want to learn about circuits can experiment with their own real-life constructions. Unfortunately, there are a ton of problems with this idea. Of course, sending out lots of kits to a large group of unconcentrated people would be prohibitively expensive. Kits are limited and by their nature they prompt the user in some way to do a specific task rather than organically creating their own project -- that is, kits don't provide varied resources the same way a university does. And of course, you can't typically do very involved or sensitive things with kits -- you can't send a lathe through the mail to an eager faraway learner, after all. All this leads us immediately back to the value of a physical, centralized location with varied resources -- ie the university as we know it today. Universities simply have the technological (and personal!) infrastructure necessary for high-quality learning in the sciences and engineering, in a way that other communities don't (and I'm tempted to think they can't).
Do other people have ideas about how better to integrate actually *doing things* with online education?
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Virtual Workshops, mens et manus
I think there's a fundamental question of whether it is important to "do things" with your hands or if it is important to be able to experiment in order to develop an engineer's intuition about how certain objects and materials behave. One of the emerging trends in upper level engineering education is the creation of virtual workshops using finite element analysis programs such as ANSYS. Since all elements of a finite element model can be parametrized and varied as desired, it is possible to "play" with FE models in virtual space. This can be a powerful technique to learn more about both basic structures such as beams and more complex systems whose fundamental length scales (whether too big - like a bridge - or too small like a micro or nano scale surface) prohibit hands-on experimentation anyway.
Existing virtual workshops tools have had limited success in part because their capabilities were limited. As a result, engineering programs are heading away from that model and towards the use of professional and practically unlimited tools. These are much harder to use but also provide much more short term educational and long term professional value.
Virtual workshops may not just improve online learning. They can also help to reduce the cost of higher education in general and reserve workshop space for projects that really cannot be done any other way.