Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've taken two of those courses. I often typed the example code from the lectures in or took notes as I would in a brick and mortar class. This meant slowing the lectures down or pausing them or rewinding them. That's great for me...but I'm on Norvig's ten year plan.
Wouldn't reading the source material (and copying from there) be even better for Norvig's ten year plan? Note that the pace of brick and mortar classes drove me mad back in my student days :) Also, the deadlines from Coursera and most MOOCs conspire against watching videos at normal speed. Most of us have day jobs and the only time we can read the lectures and do the exercises is a few hours a day, late at night. In…
One of Grossman's observations is that the length of the class correlates with completion rate. The longer the class, the more likely something will come up and throw everything off schedule. Knowing that fact means the longer the course, the more likely cutting quality will be necessary to earn a certificate.
The underlying premise for skipping around to just the interesting parts is that the entirety of the subject does not interest the student. There's nothing wrong with that. But that's not really a good target audience for the design of a class. That student is already committed to partial disengagement.
My take on programming has become that watching a programming video is like watching Jimi Hendrix play the guitar. A beginner learns almost nothing applicable because they don't have the mechanical technique as a basis for informing their seeing. A virtuoso will see new techniques and ways they could do them better.
Watching Grossman type text into a box or Ullman do a proof is less informative until I had the mechanical experience of following along. We all tune out video because it is so ubiquitous. The courses on Coursera are real courses. The results of not taking notes during lectures are pretty much the same as not taking notes during a brick and mortar lecture: some geniuses will ace the test anyway and everyone else will do average, mediocre or poorly according to their nature.