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Comment by psbp | Hacker News Reader

Coursera actually offers several classes that can be done at your own pace. It's gradually expanding, and will eventually offer a wide range of courses. There's also plenty of courses that aren't closed after their completion date.

EdX has done the same with their Introduction to Linux course: https://www.edx.org/course/linuxfoundationx/linuxfoundationx...

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That's good to know, because my complaint is the opposite of his, yet the solution is the same. I don't usually want to crash through it all in one weekend, though if that were the best timing, I might. My usual problem is that if I'm too busy to work on the class during the period they have designated as the only time Assignment 4 can be worked on, I have essentially dropped out of the class instead of just pausing it. It's like a TV mini-series shown for two hours every night for five days in the days before consumer video recorders. If something came up at work that made you miss two episodes, you may as well skip the rest, because the series is ruined.

Contrast that to just putting up all five episodes on YouTube and leaving them there. What a relief! Skip a couple of days, and you're still watching the show, as far as you're concerned.

I can't fuss too much about such great courses that are offered to me for free, but it would be nice if they could routinely post the entire course and just leave it up. Each assignment could have its own forum thread, all of them in parallel, and reading back over these threads would probably clear up anything you were wondering about.

I know some courses are already of this sort. I hope more will move in this direction.

I didn't know that. Perhaps I will have to revisit it. Thanks.

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