I'm taking a statistics specialization on Coursera. While the course content has generally been pretty good, you are correct about the complete lack of support

I'm taking a statistics specialization on Coursera. While the course content has generally been pretty good, you are correct about the complete lack of support on the forums. I also naively thought that perhaps a TA would monitor them for help... instead you have to hope that someone's volunteered to be an unpaid mentor for the course, and that they also have enough experience to know the answer. From a technological standpoint Coursera is also poor, downloading multiple megabytes of javascript to display text and videos, and to allow form submissions for quizzes. Navigation is wonky and slow. During the final peer review section of one of my courses many students ran into bugs where Coursera failed to register that a review had been completed. Luckily I got a hold of a mentor, who then had access to Coursera tech support. But the official forums seemed to be devoid of any paid employees... Unfortunately, after these experiences I'll never pay for anything on Coursera again.