Assignments that require you to extend beyond the covered material can indeed be extremely effective, though I'd qualify that with "for the right person." The

Assignments that require you to extend beyond the covered material can indeed be extremely effective, though I'd qualify that with "for the right person." The COMP 201 course at Rice University (intro comp sci for non-majors) was the experience that started me on a career path in software/web development. Several of my classmates dropped the course because the instructor used such challenging problems on chapter exams. Even though I hit/exceeded the exam time limit almost every time, I found the exams to be incredibly rewarding. I vividly recall grinding my teeth over an exam prompt asking us to write a set of controls for an RC car that could be driven with a TV remote control and also needed to elegantly remember macros of control sequences... only to show up the next day in the professor's office and be handed a remote control, driving the actual RC car with the solution from my exam. It's hard to beat engagement like that. However, I still appreciate Coursera for what it is. I'm taking the machine learning course right now, and I feel that I'm gaining a fair amount of knowledge relative to the amount of time I can put in. If I were to dedicate more time to my post-academic education, I'm sure I'd want something that moved at a faster pace or set more difficult challenges before me. It just doesn't seem useful to judge Coursera negatively because it doesn't meet an expectation it wasn't designed to meet.