[viveutvivas]

The way that Udacity does it is perfect for me -- work through at your own pace. Coursera has a couple of self-paced classes, I believe, and I wish that more of the courses had that option.

I think the majority of MOOC course developers want to run their online courses as closely to their university versions as possible, since that's what they're used to working with. It also provides a handy way for them to go off-duty, in a sense, if the course has a finite end date. Using their current pacing structure (which is incredibly difficult, as the OP points out, for people that aren't full-time students) allows the teachers to do something other than devote themselves solely to the course, assuming they don't want to just post an archive and leave it alone -- which would meet a lot of people's needs, but misses the whole teacher-student interaction, which is pretty much missing from MOOCs anyway. If they want to provide an environment that's like a classroom, with students interacting with the instructors and with each other, you kind of need everybody at the same pace. It would be nice for us if they could slow that pace down, but that would probably increase the workload for the instructors.

We're still early in this game. I'm glad that so many professors have been willing to invest the time into developing the courses, and I understand why they are currently set up to be conveniently structured for them. I think we'll start to see some improvements if/when the money appears in the MOOC game. Once it's no longer basically charity work for the instructors, there will probably be more efforts to work around student schedules.

[goostavos]

I agree completely on the Udacity model allowing you to work through at your own pace, as well as keeping the course open After it finishes. The strict scheduling thing with other sites drives me mad!

In addition to having a normal job, I'm a traditional university student, so any of the online classes I take are simply out of interest in the subject. I dip into the class when I have time, almost like a leisure activity. I just don't currently have the time to fit in more strict course work on top of my already over loaded class schedule and work week.