The hard truth is that the student gets out of a class what they put into it. I have finished 3 Coursera classes, two of which gave certificates. All three were well worth my time, but I worked my tail off to complete the challenging assignments. I found the support staff (TAs) helpful in the forums. Life does get in the way some times but all three coures had at least a week to finish an assignment, typically two and the option of applying late days on quizzes.
The biggest thing I noticed were the clueless forum posts by students who obviously had not read much of the provided material. Two of the classes had material similar to ESR's "How to ask questions the smart way" and this was largely ignored. I think we are seeing the fall out of the distraction of modern society. Sadly, tl;dr doesn't work with complex technical material.
That said, it was a privilege to interact with motivated fellow students. Their input in the forums helped eliminate misconceptions.
By the way, the statistics for our Data Analysis class were similar to those from the OP - from the instructor: "There were approximately 102,000 students enrolled in the course, about 51,000 watched videos, 20,000 did quizzes, and 5,500 did/graded the data analysis assignments."
The biggest thing I noticed were the clueless forum posts by students who obviously had not read much of the provided material. Two of the classes had material similar to ESR's "How to ask questions the smart way" and this was largely ignored. I think we are seeing the fall out of the distraction of modern society. Sadly, tl;dr doesn't work with complex technical material.
That said, it was a privilege to interact with motivated fellow students. Their input in the forums helped eliminate misconceptions.
By the way, the statistics for our Data Analysis class were similar to those from the OP - from the instructor: "There were approximately 102,000 students enrolled in the course, about 51,000 watched videos, 20,000 did quizzes, and 5,500 did/graded the data analysis assignments."