[psykotic]

The Coursera courses I've previewed have been fine. But even the flagships (e.g. Andrew Ng's machine learning course) are just traditional lectures divided into smaller pieces with an auxiliary system for dealing with homework, student-student and student-instructor interactions, etc. There's nothing wrong with that, but from my perspective it's only a marginal improvement on the long-form video lectures that have been available online for years.

I predict that the incoming slew of new Coursera courses will adhere even closer to tradition. They're driven more by universities wanting to be fashionable than by a grassroots commitment from individual instructors at those institutions.

For comparison, I've completed most of CS212 on Udacity and 6.002x on edX. The edX system is very impressive for a first pass, and Udacity has come a long way from Thrun and Norvig's first AI class, both in polish and pedagogy. Udacity's hands-on programming approach is great but obviously isn't a good fit for every kind of course. The on-the-fly quizzes are more generally applicable, but I've mostly found them to be a useless distraction.