I really love moocs. I've somewhat become addicted to them. One huge problem I have with them however is that there is no obvious path for learning in them. Note I am not talking about the course itself but the path from one course to another. This isn't a problem held by all of them (notably Udacity and Saylor). For coursera and edx however they just seem to be an eclectic jumble of unrelated courses. If I want to take a course but don't meet the requirements I'm pretty much screwed if the course isn't being given. If I want to expand my knowledge a step further I don't know where to go.
There's an algorithms I and an algorithms II course, for example.
I'm starting Crytography I next week, and expect that to have a follow up as well, and Analytic Combinatorics, Part I is in a couple of months.
The logic course that finishes up in a week or so though, that one seems to come out of nowhere and not have much of a stated follow on to it. Despite, of course, being useful for all manner of computer science.
But as for the groundings for these courses. I don't know what the answer is. I don't think the providers need to provide a basics level, especially if they are getting sign up numbers into the 50k per course. But providing basics courses or self-study pre-courses would be a good move, considering the number of people in the logic course who, unfortunately, didn't have the knowledge base the course requires.
There are some pain points coursera could smooth over, and having a better course search and course reference system is one of them.
I think, because it seems that a number of these courses are on line equivalents of off line courses, the thought hasn't been put into making the course abstracts stand on their own, but instead are just rewordings of the standard course descriptions.
