I think the real "dirty little secret" is that not nearly as many people actually want to learn a topic as think they do.
The author said he really "intended" to take the class, but did he? Or did he just like the idea of it?
Learning is hard work. Learning difficult subjects is harder still, and it's very demanding of your time. There's really no way around that fact.
Let's be honest here, a lot of subjects sound interesting, but are you really willing to put in the time and effort to learn about them? It's never going to be painless.
I'm pretty much constantly in a Coursera course, but I drop half of them. I'm over feeling bad about it. Turns out I wasn't as interested in the topic as I thought. For other courses I am, and I do the work.
I truly believe you have really identified the elephant in the room with online learning (especially the free sites).
Learning is hard work. Period. Granted, its a different kind of work, and can be really enjoyable. As you stated, you need to put in the time and certain topics cannot be "watered down" too much no matter how hard the instructor may try.
The benefit of these sites are that anyone can sample the menu as there is no real downside. If one were to actually pay some fee for the course, the chances of sampling the different courses would really go down.
I don't believe there really is an issue here. Being able to try out different courses and realizing what you like and don't like is so incredibly powerful.
What can be improved on is to identify these types of learners. Coursera could start out right of the bat asking, "How likely are you to finish this course." The metric of completion should not be used to judge a course either.
I have finished six coursera/udacity classes so far. The last one felt really hard, not because of the material or the teacher. I wasn't really interested in the subject. It was something that I thought it would be good and useful to learn, but I was not passionate about it. So, last night, I finally finished the course, but it wasn't easy.
So really the questions that I should be asking next time is which class I really feel passionate about, and/or how do I become passionate about the class that I am taking.
The only things I'd like from Coursera courses are:
* more that take 8-10 weeks rather than 6 weeks
* if the CS course happens to use a particular language then make it incredibly easy to get setup and provide downloadable structure for any assignments (the scala coursera course has that nailed)
* better estimates for # hours a week
In general thought the synchronous approach works perfectly for me and is the big reason I haven't yet felt the need to do any Udacity courses.
You are correct. Given the information deluge and the typical tl;dr response, none of this is surprising. The nice thing about Coursera is that there is no downside. Paying close to $50K/year for a first tier university is another matter. Sadly, in that case, too many students take the easy credit and end up with a boat load of debt and no degree.
