I imagine they want demographic data on who's taking the course. If you were running a large-scale education experiment, wouldn't you want to be able to measure how things are going and account for variables such as gender, age, and education level? I bet they are going to look at location as well, via IP addresses.
...and as we just learned, this is enough info to uniquely identify you, even without your name :)
> I bet they are going to look at location as well, via IP addresses.
Why would they do it that way rather than self reporting?
I would say gender should be irrelevant too ...
gender could give them all sorts of interesting statistics about what happens to gender ratios in CS when you take the course outside of a traditional classroom.