I'll qualify my critique in that it depends on how the class leverages Coursera. I've taken five classes on Coursera two of which were through the UIUC program

I'll qualify my critique in that it depends on how the class leverages Coursera. I've taken five classes on Coursera two of which were through the UIUC program (procrastinating a type inferencer assignment as I write this). There are a handful of things Coursera gets right: Videos.Playback works. I generally download them all immediately regardless. Progress tracking. Easy confirmation of what I've done already. There are several problems it fails to solve: Course Communication. There's a discussion form. It's not used. These are supplemented with other means of communication depending on the course that all need to be checked (email, Piazza, Slack, dedicated forum, etc.) Live Events. Typically these are links to a Zoom instance with all the attendant difficulties. Integration. Instructors often want to use outside tools for automated graders and the like. Coursera has tools to integrate authentication to make this first class, but it often means learning the idiosyncrasies for a new tool for every class. Generally, the integration is slightly broken in some way requiring some irritating workaround. Quiz/Testing platform. Difficult for instructors to get right. This results in things like never seeing the correct answers to a final because view rules aren't well understood by the instructor or free-form answers being too picky. Proctoring. Coursera doesn't have a solve for this. Remote proctoring is generally garbage and easily the most frustrating experience for me. UIUC uses ProctorU which I despise, but that's another rabbit hole. Content Navigation. It's based on a week-by-week view. This can give a false impression of progress. This can make navigating between thematically similar content in week 4 and week 5 difficult. In most instances, I would prefer an index page that mimics the the syllabus with links to the content and discussion forum. As for the MCS it's been a good investment thus far. I've taken two classes, Data Mining and Programming Languages & Compilers. Like most things, you get out of it what you put into it. It would be possible for me to learn most of this on my own but the long term motivation wouldn't be there. This is especially helpful for formalism I struggle to learn on my own. Most of the classes have a project component which allows a significant amount of depth. I'm taking Computational Photography this coming term which I'm excited to lose my weekends to. https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs445/sp2020/ https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs445/sp2020/