I feel somewhat the same. I took a couple Udacity courses that were great and quite a few from Coursera. Coursera's free offerings are now partially gutted by restricting non-paying students from taking tests and submitting assignments.
It might have been a different story if they announced from the beginning that they are only offering their services for free for a certain period of time. They focused on gaining users and they succeeded on that, but now that they are focused on making money they seem to lose users.
It's natural that you are losing users once you start asking for money, it's just impossible to have it otherwise. Let's not forget that Coursera is a business so they obviously need to generate some revenue, sooner or later. What they did seems like a sensible business decision to me. They focused and succeeded with the marketing and branding initially (Coursera became almost synonymous with online courses) and they are collecting the revenue from it now.
Charge for it but don't try and fool me with "I am nice and doing good" talk.
I don't think that's true. People don't seem to feel that entitled in the "analog" world. But the digital technology changes the equation, and frankly, I think our "lizard brain" is right on this one.
The marginal cost of producing another copy of digitally encoded product is essentially zero, and it requires zero specialist knowledge. Copying binary data is what computers are made for, it's their basic function. Plus, the Internet lets you scale a digital business to the whole world for (almost) free. Honestly, what feels entitled is expecting that one should be able to scale their business by orders of magnitude while retaining the price.
(And in general, charging for copying data feels a lot like charging for air, but that's another topic.)
But regardless, Coursera is really playing fast and loose with their credibility. It used to be that it was the place you could go to get a decent education on some topic for free, at any time and in your own pace. What it (and other sites like it) turned into is a money-making machine. You get forced to follow a particular schedule ("yadda yadda people can't learn if they're not forced"), the course materials are often available only during the particular time window and disappear as soon as the course ends, and now they're also employing a lot of dark patterns to make sure you can't even find the free courses. All that while talking how their mission is to bring accessible education to the world. Bullshit. They're just making money because media wrote a lot about them and made them look hot.
You know how real revolution in education looks like? It looks like this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11561770 - the original article + the comment thread + the links in that comment thread.
Well, it can be said about most of the SaaS companies but that's not how business works. If it doesn't cost you anything to produce, then you should give it away for free might look great at first sight but it's not that great in reality. So if the business is just giving away the product for free, why would someone pay for that? You might say extra features, etc. But they are free to distribute as well!
If we apply this to the physical products, you can equally say that the companies shouldn't charge more than it costs to produce something. But if all companies worked this way, that would take us back to the stone age pretty quickly.
Money motivates people, motivate people produce goods.
But that's what happens in the physical world in face of competition (and that's the "great promise of capitalism", btw.) - prices fall down to minimal sustainable level unless someone is able to erect some artificial structure that will inflate them (like enough layers of middlemen).
But anyway, I don't mind Coursera or others trying out any business model they want. But them talking about a "mission to ensure access to education to everyone", etc.? This is getting dishonest. I'm criticizing them for saying they're doing this for humanity, while in fact getting further and further away from this goal every day.
In education, the artificial structure is often exclusivity in admissions. This also works for nightclubs.
No one would have whined much about add-ons for a cost. But to restrict what was originally part of the core free experience - the experience they built their reputation on - is why any backlash now is entirely of their own making.
That being said, there's an amazing wealth of knowledge on the internet completely free to consume not locked behind any particular walled garden awaiting those who dare step out of their comfort zones of consumption/absorption, but its not nicely packaged in the latest fad de jour… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Even if you plan on being an entrepreneur, your first media coverage is either going to say 'the Harvard graduate' or 'the self taught .. '. So it's an indicator even then. For Apple and Microsoft, 'college dropout' featured in nearly every early article. It became something of a compliment after a bit though and helped them stand out somehow. Nothing is ever simple, but just being accepted is probably enough even if you don't finish.
> 'college dropout' featured in nearly every early article. It became something of a compliment after a bit though and helped them stand out somehow.
'Standing out' is irrelevant in this context unless your business is entirely based on you being a famous figure in the press. Gates and Jobs are famous because of the incredible companies they built, not the other way around. The press needed to paint a story, so they went with the college dropout narrative. However their success, and the success of every company/founder is entirely independent of founder social validation.
We're definitely in the minority, but some of us in hiring positions actively discriminate against the didn't-learn-until-college demographic for software developers.
Of course there's nothing wrong with an early interest in computers and programming. However, "actively discriminating" as you put it has the effect of effectively selecting for males from a background that enables an early interest in computers.