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The problem with these is... I'm busy.

I might be able to commit 70 hours to the tutorials and assignments this week, and then im busy again for the next 7 weeks.

If they were all completely self paced, then perhaps the completion rates will improve.

The "deadlines" and timetabled classes are being carried over from traditional college courses without any real need for them to be.

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Udacity's model is to provide self-paced classes with absolutely no deadlines or time windows, as opposed to Coursera and edX's more traditional approach. I can see the argument that some people would prefer having more structure; that might help with motivation. I think the ideal platform would allow, like Udacity, the ability to start a class at any time, but provide options to tweak time constraints and deadlines for people who would like to include them. If sufficiently powerful and flexible, that might provide the best of both worlds.

How about a model that lets you learn in your own time (free) and have the option of taking the class with a co-hort(for a fee).

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