There’s been no shortage of media coverage on Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in the past year. Universities have touted the value of free on-line courses offered to millions of learners from all walks of life. Some MOOC critics have argued that the “MOOC revolution” has been characterized by the Gartner Hype Cycle and that 2012, the Year of the MOOC, has given way to a new trough of disillusionment. Recent criticisms by faculty at Amherst College and professors at San Jose State University have questioned the pedagogical value of these online courses.

However, directly comparing MOOCs to traditional classrooms may prevent us from realizing the true potential of global online education. Perhaps it’s time we stop trying to fit MOOCs into old educational molds and start considering how we can harness their powers in new and exciting ways.

We can use MOOCs as platforms for real-world problem solving. This March, over 90,000 life-long learners from 143 countries enrolled in Foundations of Business Strategy, a MOOC offered through Coursera by the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. These learners enrolled to explore the frameworks and theories underlying successful business strategies. Some came from leading international organizations such as General Electric, Grameenphone, Johnson & Johnson, Samsung, and Walmart. Many others were intrepid entrepreneurs, small business operators, and social venture founders. With their unique backgrounds, the students wove a rich tapestry of ideas and creative insights.

To harness these students’ talents, the course’s final project invited them to help real organizations by performing a strategic analysis of an existing firm’s business operations. In partnership with Coursolve, an initiative founded by two of us that connects organizations with courses to empower students to solve real-world problems, the course enabled a wide range of businesses to take advantage of the global student body’s insights and creativity.

One hundred organizations joined the course and actively connected with learners. Organizations of all types participated, from resource-strapped small enterprises to established brick-and-mortar organizations, including one with close to 280,000 employees operating in over 30 countries.

The result: of those organizations that were in existence for 10 years or more and who completed the post-course survey, nearly 60% indicated that they would want to collaborate with students to address future business problems. But not just any problems: 72% of these organizations sought assistance on medium to very high priority challenges. The results were comparable across organizations of all ages, suggesting that new ventures and established initiatives alike can derive value from working with students.

In a knowledge economy, life-long learning is not confined to a canonical classroom, and students enrolling in MOOCs cannot be compared with those enrolling in traditional higher education settings. We need to rethink what constitutes “a student.” Today’s students are astute, have work experiences, and in many cases, have already developed a set of core competencies. Moreover, students in MOOCs offer unique international perspectives that would be the envy of any business school classroom.

In Foundations of Business Strategy, over 80% of students had at least an undergraduate degree and over 50% were industry professionals. Many of these students — consultants, managers, analysts and entrepreneurs — brought with them a well-developed ability to solve hard problems, which they exhibited through rich case study discussions and strategic advice that had a game-changing impact on some existing companies.

To make these MOOC experiences work both for organizations and students, some basic principles apply. Organizations must ask themselves not just what they want to get out of it, but why working on this problem will be meaningful to students, and how they will successfully work with students when they can only dedicate 2 hours a week over the course of six weeks.

However, despite the challenges, connecting with courses is a relatively simple way in which organizations can engage talented people from around the world, the future drivers of tomorrow’s marketplace. For instance, Foundations of Business Strategy attracted students from all across the globe, including some of earth’s fastest growing economies including Kazakhstan, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda, as well as from larger emerging market countries such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Who wouldn’t want to tap into such pools of knowledge?