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Agree 100%, it's maddening. A lot of the people that would get the most out of these courses don't have time to adhere to a strict schedule like they expect you too. I wonder if it has to do with colleges realizing just how disruptive it could be to there business model.

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Couple months ago, I met Andrew Ng at a meet up and asked him why there's deadline for the courses (comparing to Udacity model). He said they did a study, courses with deadlines tends to have more students.

I found that it's very plausible. I still have couple of Udacity classes half finished, thinking I can always come back later, while working furiously on Coursera's deadlines...

At some point they must cycle (with TAs?), right? How else to amortize fixed costs?

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