The quality of their courses and their offerings is great. Also the very real mentoring is awesome.
I think online education companies are starting to figure out that
Online education != pure self study
I think more and more human support will be injected back into online courses.
That hasn't been my experience at all. I haven't seen a Coursera class that cost more than $79.00 and all the ones I've taken will let you switch sessions as many times as you want (so far as I can tell) making the nominal timeline a non-issue. I recently started a Bayesian Statistics class on Coursera, then got really busy with other stuff halfway through... I've switched sessions like 4 times now with no problem.
- Lectures are divided into small chunks, often 5 minutes or less. I'm easy to be bored, but was hardly when taking the course.
- Interactive review questions are provided for every subtopic of a lesson.