Coursera closes courses on the old platform. Materials can be downloaded until June 30 (there is a script)

Nothing personal just business

If you think that the most important thing brought the Internet into our life? What has changed the society most of all, what is most valuable? It is difficult to answer, it is difficult to choose among everything, too many options come to mind. One of these options is mass open online education , free and affordable education for all people on Earth, using e-learning technologies and open access via the Internet. Regardless of the place of residence and financial prosperity, everyone in the world can now receive education at the highest level, listen to lectures by the world's best specialists in effective curricula, which previously were available only in elite universities.

Coursera , a project opened in 2012 by computer science professors at Stanford University Andrew Eun and Daphne Koller , has become an advanced platform for mass online education.



Coursera quickly gained crazy popularity. Tens of millions of users, 1,563 training courses from 140 universities from 28 countries (as of January 2016). By the way, the most popular of all one and a half thousand courses in all languages ​​of the world , according to Coursera statistics, is the course in Russian “ We build robots and other devices on the Arduino. From a traffic light to a 3D printer . ” The course is taught by teachers from the laboratory of innovative educational technologies of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology: Alexey Perepelkin, head of the robotics department, and Dmitry Savitsky, researcher. Even this fact shows how popular the Coursera is with the Russian audience.
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Free and affordable education for all. The best training programs in the most relevant subjects - lectures, practical exercises, online check, support for mobile applications for the iPhone and Android ... What else can a resident of some Russian backwoods, for whom online education in programming, robotics, machine learning , artificial intelligence - the only hope is to somehow improve your life in the future. What can I say, many people have already changed their lives thanks to Coursera. But all good things end sooner or later.

Unfortunately, even on the Sun there are spots. With regret we have to admit that our beloved “Curser” in recent years has become increasingly greedy , almost like Udacity.

Like some other projects that have declared “accessible accessible education for all the inhabitants of the Earth,” Coursera is also gradually commercializing. Like Udacity, in Coursera, money gradually becomes a top priority, and for this the company sacrifices the interests of its users. Of course, this is a private project (unlike edX ), the company has the full right to earn money and use different business models, but given such a development vector, it will be some hypocrisy to say that the company "provides universal access to the world's best education" . Previously, they declared universal access to “free education” (“is free of charge”), but now the word “free” has been carefully removed from all pages of the site .


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For Coursera, the business model at the first stage envisaged a massive involvement of users with further commercialization. In principle, there is nothing surprising in this; according to this cynical business model, many Internet companies operate that offer free services to users.

Having received an audience of tens of millions of people, Coursera began to gradually tighten the screws.

It all started with the fact that Coursera, like everyone else, refused to issue free certificates. Only paid remained. It is clear that they are beautiful - they are sent in paper form, with stamps, etc. But for many, it was enough to have a free certificate in digital form and a pdf file (amendment 06/13/2016: apparently, paper certificates are no longer being sent, now digital certificates have become paid).

Well, no big deal, many thought. What is the difference, whether they give a free certificate in digital form or not, because the main thing is knowledge, curriculum, which remained here of the highest quality.

Then they turned off free access to questionnaires and assignments. It was already strange. Everyone knows that completing assignments is an important part of the learning process. How to study algorithms, if you do not check the knowledge gained in real problems? In the end, the job still remained available, but it was impossible to send and check the answer. Well, this is at least something, it could be worse, many thought.

And now Coursera has undertaken another (last?) Reform - they generally remove all courses from the old platform! This decision caused a natural outrage among some users.

“The golden era of mass open online education is coming to an end,” said one of the past students of Coursera, an Indian student Tarun Wangani (Tarun Vangani), who studies programming.

The problem is that on the new platform, not all courses available on the old one are available. “On the old platform, the courses contain practical tasks - it seems that this material [of the Coursera] is troubling,” writes Tarun Wangani. He states that as a result of this decision, a huge amount of material from public use will disappear, both on forums and in problem books.

"And they were obviously very generous, sending out e-mails with a reminder to back up our data so that they would not be lost." For this Coursera recommends such a wonderful method:

To save course materials from the old platform:

• Download all lecture slides or videos that you would like to keep for reference.
• Keep a record of your answers to questions and other assignments by taking screenshots .

Screenshots? Thank you very much!

The text of the letter is fully published in the comments .


Coursera gives everyone the time until June 30th to download courses. Here are some courses that will delete after this date.

• https://class.coursera.org/ml-005/lecture Machine Learning, Andrew Ng
• https://class.coursera.org/algo-003/lecture Algorithms 1, Tim Roughgarden
• https://class.coursera.org/algo2-003/lecture Algorithms 2, Tim Roughgarden
• https://class.coursera.org/compilers/lecture/preview Compilers, Alex Aiken
• https://class.coursera.org/crypto-010/lecture , Cryptography I, Dan Boneh
• https://class.coursera.org/nlp/lecture , Natural Language Processing (Stanford), Dan Jurafsky, Christopher Manning
• https://class.coursera.org/automata/lecture , Automata, Jeff Ullman
• https://class.coursera.org/hci/lecture , Human-Computer Interaction, Scott Klemmer
• https://class.coursera.org/pgm/lecture , Probabilistic Graphical Models, Daphne Koller
• https://class.coursera.org/machlearning-001/lecture , Machine Learning, Pedro Domingos

PS Instructions for automatically downloading Coursera courses (using the coursera-dl script) with video files, slides, etc. For practical tasks, as indicated above, there are only screenshots.

UPD 12.06. For clarification: now Coursera does not always require payment for solving problems on free courses on a new platform. Some courses are still completely free, along with tasks, you only need to pay for the certificate. The comments say that some courses from the old platform can also be found on the new platform.