Yeah, I started off super into self-learning, even before the whole MOOC thing took off. I loved the MIT Open Courseware courses in high school, and I even really liked the central thesis of Illich's Deschooling Society.
Then I started tutoring and teaching. That's when I realized that I'm an extreme outlier. Most people are not particularly motivated and won't put in the hours upon hours of struggle.
The average experience of learning CS in university is just completely alien if you teach yourself how to program as a child. The biggest differences is the emotional labor. There are lots of things that my students would describe as "frustrating" that I have literally never thought of as frustrating (e.g., reading compiler errors). I think it's similar to learning a new language as an adult vs. as a small child.
