Putting the content to one side and focusing on the design I have been impressed by the clear simplicity of both Futurelearn and Coursera. Futurelearn's Why it Works section very clearly explains its teaching strategy, it says that every course has been designed using the principles of effective learning design "through storytelling, discussion, visible learning, and using community support to celebrate progress." Given that the partners include universities with considerable experience of online learning one being the UK's Open University you would certainly expect collaboratively they could produce a sound product. Coursera also has a very similar About section which gives an overview of Bloom's mastery learning, courses are also delivered by some very experienced institutions, However, history has shown that experienced elearning partner collaborations do not always guarantee success, look at the failure of the UK e.University in the early 00s - for more about this I recommend The Real Story Behind the Failure of the UK e.University.
Donald Clarke in his blog Futurelearn 4 pluses and 4 minuses , argues that Futurelearn's strengths are its constructivist learning and peer review. However the minuses for him are, the lack of openness about finances, the unnecessary and expensive resource of the BBC and the infrequency of the courses. This post was written in 2014, his final criticism was the the dullness of Futurelearn's design, but I think that this may have improved over the last year, although there is always room for improvement.
Possibly focusing less on the learning platform and more on the elearning design has resulted in Futurelearn and Coursera, succeeding where the UKeU failed (although neither learning platform is a budget option see another blog by Clark MOOCs Platforms: a primer). Both platforms deliver very similar approaches to course design, videos, supporting material, integrated discussions, small scale assessment. In both cases I would argue their simplicity is their strength however, if a linear approach to learning is not your thing a MOOC may not be for you . Personally I think VLEs are somewhat expensive overly engineered tools that contain too many features but they do provide a safe learning and teaching assessment environment for students. Chris Havergal's THES article Lacklustre Virtual Learning Environments Need a 21st Century Boost on a recent technology themed Westminster Higher Education forum reported on the criticisms by some attendees of poor institutional use of the VLE, Nevertheless I would argue that best practice elearning is not always evidenced by those teachers who use every tool in the box, as this can be extremely confusing to students, it always was and always is evidenced by good clear coherent design. To learn how to deliver a sound learning experience teaching staff may find dipping into a MOOC a useful experience as most elements of a MOOC course can be replicated in a VLE and the content does not always need to be created from scratch as there is excellent content available that can be curated, as Edinburgh's E-learning and Digital Culture's MOOC has evidenced.
