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Coursera shuts access to old platform courses

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Re: Coursera shuts access to old platform courses

#161

Post by znpy »

smarx007 wrote: post #138
draven wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to suggest coordinating a bit to make a torrent for each course and avoid generating too much trafic downloading them, but it seems to be prohibited by the ToS ("You may download content from our Services only for your personal, non-commercial use, unless you obtain Coursera's written permission to otherwise use the content".)

Wise Russians downloaded most of them already: http://imgur.com/rdPhclR http://imgur.com/MzQesnK http://imgur.com/9iN21V7 (from https://rutracker.org/forum/tracker.php?nm=Coursera )

Thanks mate :)

Re: Coursera shuts access to old platform courses

#162

Post by znpy »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #105
draven wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to suggest coordinating a bit to make a torrent for each course and avoid generating too much trafic downloading them, but it seems to be prohibited by the ToS ("You may download content from our Services only for your personal, non-commercial use, unless you obtain Coursera's written permission to otherwise use the content".)

Well, they brought it on themselves. If the only way to download courses they allow in ToS is to DDoS them with download requests, so be it.

It will be no problem as all filed are served via Amazon CloudFront CDN...

... But they're gonna get a hell of a bill this month, I guess.

Re: Coursera shuts access to old platform courses

#163

Post by [deleted] »

znpy wrote: post #116

In case you want to download as may courses as possible before they fade away, here are some notes. Please forgive me some mistakes, I wrote this a bit in a hurry. =========================== 1) Spawn a virtual server on DigitalOcean. I am using the 40$/month in order to have 40GB of space, but my plan is to shut it down in a day or two. The advantage is to have storage space AND super-fast connection. If you don't w…

[deleted]

Re: Coursera shuts access to old platform courses

#164

Post by veddox »

Shame! I've done courses on both Udacity and Coursera in the past. Not very many, but they did shape me and taught me stuff I either couldn't have learned any other way or could not have learnt as well.

I understand that they are both businesses that need to take care of their finances if they want to survive. Nonetheless, I am still disappointed - when they started out some years back they were all full of vigour and idealism about free education, and somewhere along the line they have been quietly dropping that idealism. They didn't even try to explain why they were doing what they were doing and why they were changing. In essence, they betrayed who they were at the beginning, and that's what makes me sad.

So thank you, Udacity and Coursera, for who you were and what you gave me, but I fear our roads shall part here...

Re: Coursera shuts access to old platform courses

#165

Post by deprave »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #149
pakitan wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If institutional partners treated MOOCs as a marketing exercise for their university's brand Top universities already have plenty of brand recognition and get way more applicants than what they can accept. The monetary value of any additional marketing is probably very close to zero for them.

I don't buy that reasoning. If that were true, they'd cease doing anything for marketing purposes. In reality, a brand and a reputation of educational leadership is something that requires continuous investment.

Correct, and top universities do that through investment in research and publication rather than populist fads.

Every once in a while people call into question the value of higher education and ask whether MOOCs mark the end of traditional universities. I find it ironic that when top universities flex their muscles and start asking those people to pay up for classes - the same classes that you otherwise would have had to go through admissions and tuition to get into - they're being called money grabbers.

Re: Coursera shuts access to old platform courses

#166

Post by ajmurmann »

I understand that they need to make money. However, something like this provides so much value to society that we as a society have a large interest in keeping it as available to everyone as possible. Therefore I think that we need to have a publicly funded platform like this or one run by a non-profit like Wikimedia Foundation. The lower the barrier for everyone to take classes the better.

Re: Coursera shuts access to old platform courses

#167

Post by StevePerkins »

jaked89 wrote: post #154
latenightcoding wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just don't get it. I can afford to pay for a MOOC and I would consider it, but there are millions of people who can't afford it. Coursera's about page used to say this: "committed to making the best education in the world freely available to any person who seeks it". Now they have removed every instance of the word "free" https://www.coursera.org/about/ Nothing wrong with being a for-profit company, but they went…

So? They have changed their business model. They're entitled to do so. If you care so much about the poor, you might as well subsidize a MOOC for them, instead of demanding Coursera to do so.

And people are "entitled" to criticize them on the Internet.

Sheesh, people really over-dramatize Hacker News threads. We aren't a legislative chamber debating a bill. We're an assortment of techno-hipster liberals and wannabe-entrepreneur libertarians, commenting on (often trivial) current events over coffee on a Saturday morning. The moral outrage-over-the-outrage-over-the-outrage-over-the-outrage gets comical after the first couple recursions.

Re: Coursera shuts access to old platform courses

#168

Post by r3bl »

znpy wrote: post #159
raldu wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why not share all the downloaded content through a p2p torrent network, rather than to keep them in our own servers to ourselves, so that everyone else benefits?

As someone else pointed out, that is not allowed by the TOS. But quite frankly... now that such content is not freely available anymore, I expect that to begin circulating on the p2p networks anyway.

Yup, in 20 days when the content becomes unavailable, people will trade them like they trade... well, pretty much anything that they can't get easily by following the law.

Re: Coursera shuts access to old platform courses

#169

Post by komali2 »

shock wrote: post #153
raldu wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why not share all the downloaded content through a p2p torrent network, rather than to keep them in our own servers to ourselves, so that everyone else benefits?

The Coursera TOS prohibit this. Specificaly, "You may download content from our Services only for your personal, non-commercial use, unless you obtain Coursera's written permission to otherwise use the content."[0] [0] - https://www.coursera.org/about/terms

That's fine, but so why don't we? If the whole purpose of downloading all these courses is so that we can continue to access them after Coursera goes full moneygrub mode, surely someone is willing to sacrifice their Coursera account for this?

Re: Coursera shuts access to old platform courses

#170

Post by cpkpad »

haches wrote: post #125

Worthwhile to point out that edX is a non-profit [1] unlike Coursera [2] and Udacity [3]. [1] https://www.edx.org/about-us [2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/coursera [3] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/udacity

Kinda. They act more like a for-profit than like a non-profit.
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