I enrolled in the "Data Analysis" Coursera class this fall, on recommendations from online acquaintances, to see what Coursera was like and to start getting the hang of R.

As far as I can tell, it's closely similar to module 4 here. (One notable difference is that it relied on plot exclusively rather than ggplot2, for some unfathomable reason.)

The experience was a mixed bag. I did learn a bunch of things I didn't know; however only a small fraction of the course covered theoretical concepts, and as the course progressed it focused more and more on memorizing R commands without any deep understanding of the math they are based on.

I'm not at all convinced that the video format is more effective than a book with the same information. I watched videos at 1.5x speedup, sometimes read the transcripts and skipped segments of video entirely. What value I found there was in doing the exercises, and there were relatively few of those. A couple of the "correct" answers were in fact incorrect, generating controversy in the student forums, but the instructors/administrators didn't seem to care much or even notice.

MOOCs are sometimes advertised as "self-paced" learning; in the case of Coursera, this is a lie. Because I enrolled late, I wasn't able to get official credit for any of the exercise sets I completed (I also skipped the problems entirely). On the one hand it's nice that you can enroll out of phase, but on the other hand it's sort of silly that an online course is still tied to an artificial schedule. For instance, if you are going faster than the class, you will still have to wait for each segment to be opened on a weekly basis.

Finally, I've just discovered that because the class I took is now closed, I am no longer allowed access to any of the videos, quizzes and assignments - nor to my own results. I don't think I need to harp on how broken this is.