“hierarchical teacher centric” teaching. You are probably right. You can work hard to shift this a little.

Years ago in our home grown LMS (Interact, based on Learning Loop, now not maintained http://sourceforge.net/projects/cce-interact/) we had an item called I think a “group” where with one click a ‘student’ could be given full admin rights in that group. There was also self signup for groups.
This combination was great for managing free range type courses for In service Teacher development.

My sympathies for the MOOC. 🙂 I haven’t watched the video. I’m not sure if you are complaining or not. If you give equal power to everybody, chaos can ensue. Or not. It just depends.

-Derek