One thing I've found somewhat odd is how seriously people take the timeline on coursera courses. To me one of the biggest weaknesses of these courses is the hard time constraints.

For all of the courses I've taken (ML, PGM, NLP, SNA) I've followed roughly the same pattern: follow the course for 50-70% of the material doing all homeworks etc. Take what I've learned and go off do some fun projects. Once I hit a road block return to the course and finish up (usually months after the course is 'officially' done) typically forgoing the homework being I've already created 'homework' for myself.

Compared to my classroom experiences, I've found that this method greatly enhances the benefit of the materials I learn later in the course, as well as allowing me to more strongly reinforce material learned earlier. This is also something that physical classes simply cannot emulate. I do find it a little funny that I've never officially completed a coursera course, despite having covered much of the material very thoroughly. Hopefully as these courses continue we'll start to see them adopt patterns that extend beyond replicating the limitations of a physical classroom online.