They say you can "audit" the course for free, but they employ a ton of grey patterns to get you to pay for it. I haven't been able to find out where to audit it yet.
Update: You have to go into the individual courses within the specialization and the enroll popup will have an audit option.
All videos of all courses in Coursera are free. You can watch them fully without providing your credit card info.
There are two types of courses in Coursera- free and paid.
In case of the paid courses, you can go to the course and navigate to the "Buy Subscription" page and click on "audit the course". You can watch all the videos for free, but you don't get access to quizzes and programming assignments (you never know what a web search will turn up ;)) ⊕. You do not get a certificate by completing a course or completing all courses of a "Specialization".
In the case of a free course, you get access to all the videos, quizzes, and assignments. You don't get any kind of certificate. Instead of going to subscription page, you can just click "Enroll" and choose the no certification option.
There are some great courses in the free tier (videos + assignments, no certs) as well. Dan Boneh's Cryptography and Grossman's Programming Languages A, B, C come to mind. Also Model Thinking by Scott Page.
There were some great discussions on HN in the past. [0][1][2]
⊕ There are courses where duplicates of paid assignments and quizzes are provided under "Practice Assignment" as opposed to "Graded Assignment". Like Martin Odersky's Functional Programming Principles in Scala MOOC.
I'll ask the opposite question.. how much do these courses cost? Some quick googling has led me to Coursera, but their pricing model seems a bit obtuse. So if they're going to try and grey-pattern me into paying i'm trying to understand how much i would pay. I don't care about a degree from these places, i'd just like to learn.
(specifically the crypto course sounds interesting)
Coursera has a monthly $45 fee for the whole specialization. But, the specializations also include a 7 day trial. You get access to all course material and assignments and all courses. Back in my college days(2-3 years ago), I would start a specialization and blaze through in 6-7 days. Money saved and time well spent. Ofc now that I am working, it's not going to be that easy.
Update: You have to go into the individual courses within the specialization and the enroll popup will have an audit option.
First Course is here: https://www.coursera.org/learn/neural-networks-deep-learning...