One of the "o" in MOOC is "open", which many previous MOOCs no longer seem to be.

One of the more impressive resources on the coursera of old was stanford's CS103 course, which if it is still on there I can't find. In fact Stanford seem to have pulled out all their coursera courses.

Most providers in the MOOC space moved away from open learning, which is a shame.

I'm taking Andrew Ng's machine learning class now on Coursera. This might be a special case though since Andrew is a co-founder of Coursera.

MOOC really should be open and non-profit. I am sure there will people willing to donate as it can have a really big impact on society.

They can be! Our government (more specifically the ministry of public education and research) in France is co-funding a non-profit MOOC called France Université Numérique (France digital university) at https://www.fun-mooc.fr/

As a frequent user of Coursera since the very first days I see the following reasons for activity decline.

* UI change made the interface cluttered. Forums are hard to navigate recently. The old simpler html/CSS UI was more fluid.

* too much focus on monetization offers for unharmonious packages of courses as tracks.

Yeah, I understand they want to try to monetise, but now it looks like you have to pay. They're pushing 'specialisations' which contain several courses and a project, but it's only because I've been using it for ages that I know if I search for one of those courses directly I can just 'audit' it for free.

It's a shame really because I have to explain all of that to my friends when recommending they look at a course "I know it looks like you have to pay, but you can do it for free..."

A lot of courses now require payment. You can sign up for free, but can't take the tests or submit work for peer review, so they are impossible to complete. And you are definitely right about the UI.

> UI change made the interface cluttered. Forums are hard to > navigate recently. The old simpler html/CSS UI was more > fluid.

I disagree. Coursera has always had a terrible UI. The new one is just as bad as the old one, just in a different way.

Yes the old one was ugly. But the new is ugly and slow ... It takes MINUTES to load a forum...

This... failed to explain what a "MOOC" is anywhere.....

MOOC = Massive Open Online Course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course

it is a quite common term, though I agree a good editor would expand the acronym once. For the lazy reader: massive open online course.

MOOC websites have avoided to put a "Download All Course Material" option in the courses. Udacity came close to it, but you still need to browse all the lessons and download them individually. Coursera is even worse in this area.

I really get annoyed when someone has implemented a restriction in their product, while they know everyone can use IDM or even Python to automate downloading of the course material. (there are python tools for downloading coursera and edx courses.)

Even if the course is free, the internet traffic you use for it isn't, that's why I would really need the aforementioned option to download them in free-internet-download hours.

The problem that is yet to be solved is to reduce the cost of tuition for higher education so more people can participate and existing people can come out without a major debt. This is where MOOCs can really shine if colleges and universities allow for real credits towards a degree, not a look-alike feel good certificate. I don't see any other plan on he table to reduce the costs of higher education.