Both Coursera and Udacity are for-profit businesses, and both have yet to reveal (or decide) how they want to make that profit. Many current for-profit providers of education are not particularly well respected (University of Phoenix, Kaplan, etc). Some non-profit universities are understandable a little hesitant to work with Coursera and Udacity without a better understanding of how exactly they propose to make money (both have many suggestions, but nothing concrete as of yet).
This cynicism is one reason why some universities have decided to "go it alone" (MIT/Harvard/Berkeley being the most notable with edX).
To be clear, I'm not saying this is my viewpoint: I think very highly of both Coursera and Udacity. I just wanted to point out that some of the cynicism stems not from the idea of open access to teaching and knowledge, but from the worries over working with for-profit companies to achieve that aim.
And, personally, I'm very grateful to them for hosting such excellent free courses at the moment - the quality has generally been pretty high on the ones I've done, and the format is excellent. If they start making money off it, good for them.
However, the weekly quizzes offer a great learning experience. After watching the lectures for a week, keep taking the quiz over and over again until you really understand the material. Each time you take a quiz you get (mostly) different questions.
For some of the classes you also get a lot of additional material in the homework assignments.
Also, Class Central (http://www.class-central.com/) lists courses on order of starting date.
Interesting article about that: http://thinktraffic.net/udemy
Probably unnecessary disclaimer but... I work there.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/overbl...
Also, the real value in these courses is that they are the real deal. They should be hard, and thus not for everybody.
Completing one of these courses along with the accompanying assignments only takes you so far. Grades in a rigorous examination, however, represent a credential, which in turn sets up much needed (by the candidates taking the course) signaling. Eventually, a lot of employers might end up becoming sensitive to this signaling. A crude example of this can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3353543
If (and when) someone does crack this puzze and if employers in turn, react to this change, I see a lot of universities more than breaking a sweat. This latent potential is what, IMHO, most analysts / investors are really upbeat about.
--Business model is protecting non-profit status of $NBillion hedge funds with an education wing.
Also, if possible, some kind of assistance to get over the difficult moments and choose wisely the education path would be great.
It's still great that people are pursuing more knowledge; however, I'd much rather see MOOCs find a way to penetrate the percentage of the population that has less access to education.
I also noticed that they have a profile page for students now. This may not be brand new (although I hadn't seen it before), but it's useful and looks good.
