Coursera is Removing Software Development Courses and Hundreds of Others

At DevTeam.Space, we care deeply about software development quality and opportunities for new talented developers to rise. So we are really sorry to learn that one of the largest online education course sites, Coursera, is shutting down their old platform. They will close access to some of their software development courses and hundreds of others.

Use this guide to get them while you still can. This guide is prepared with a help of our friends at Class Central.

Coursera has been working on a new platform since 2014. It has been built in order to accommodate their ‘On Demand’ courses. While the old platform housed these courses, it did so without any fixed schedule and timing was largely based on the professors’ discretion. This resulted in a lot of courses being discovered too late for enrollment. To fix that, our friends at Class Central have built the MOOC Tracker. The tracker served as the main source of information by allowing those who were tracking a course in Class Central to receive a notification for new course sessions.

On June 30, 2016, Coursera will be shutting down the old platform and some course materials may no longer be available on the new one. Some ‘On Demand’ courses have already moved to their new home and it’s expected that more will be moved over as the date nears. However, there will be courses that will no longer be available on the new platform.

The following highly-rated courses will no longer be available on the new platform:

• Social Psychology from Wesleyan
• Stanford’s Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part 1 and Part 2.
• Jeffrey Ullman’s Automata and Minning Massive Dataset.
• Keith Delvin’s Introduction to Mathematical Thinking (Stanford)
• Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies from Princeton University.
• Princeton’s Algorithms, Part I and Part II by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne.

There are currently more than 1500 courses on Coursera and over 450 of them are still using the old platform. Any of these 450 courses (see the list here) may soon be unavailable for you. If the course is still open for enrolment, the enrolment button on the right means that it is still using the old platform, while an enrolment button on the left indicates that the course can be found in the new platform. There are only 220 courses out of the 450 that are still available for enrolment. You can check your courses on this list here.

How to Download Course Materials from the Old Platform

Step #1: Find Your Course(s)
Before proceeding, determine the courses that you are after and find them on Coursera. Proceed to the chosen course’s page that should be similar to this, https://class.coursera.org/pgm-003/lecture. The following will help you find the course(s) that are available for download. Note that you may still add the courses from the old platform to the MOCC Tracker so that we can notify you if the course moves to the new platform.

For those who are already enrolled in the course:

1. Proceed to the My Courses section.
2. Under My Course, an Archived tab should be available.
3. On the Archived tab, old platform courses should have a Course Archive link as it appears below.
4. Copy the Course Archive link.

For those who are not enrolled in the course:

1. Visit the dedicated page in Class Central to find courses that are still open for enrolment. The courses can be filtered by subject or by rating.
2. From the list, you may determine the courses that you wish to save. Once decided, you may proceed to the course page in Class Central.
3. The course page will be similar to what is shown below and the highlighted part is the link that you should copy for download.
4. Alternatively, this spreadsheet is available in Google docs with a Course Material URL that can easily be copied for download.

Step #2: Download All Course Materials
Before proceeding to this step, make sure you have the link to the course materials page (See Step 1) and sufficient space in your hard drive. The following guidelines will help you download all the course materials you need.

Using Google Chrome Plugin:

1. Install the Course Materials Downloader Google Chrome plugin. The Coursera logo should appear on the right side of your address bar, as in the image below.
2. Visit the course materials page obtained from Step 1 (course materials link). Some links require a log-in or enrolment in the course.
3. Once you are on the course materials page, click the icon shown above. A download page should appear similar to the one below.
4. Click on start download. Chrome may repeatedly ask you where to save to the download. To avoid this, we recommend that you change your default download location in Chrome.

Using Python Script (This is a bit more technical, but if you can manage it, it is the better option):

1. Install the script by following the instructions on the Github page. Please drop us a note if you are having a difficult time with installation.
2. Get the class name from the copied link in step 1. For example, if the link is https://class.coursera.org/pgm-003/lecture, pgm-003 is the class name.
3. Download the course materials by running the following command, coursera-dl -u <coursera_user> -p <coursera_pass> pgm-003
4. If you wish to download more courses, simply add more class names at the end of the command. For power users, check out the Coursera Downloader script as it gives a lot more options.

You need to hurry. Make sure to download all necessary materials before June 30th, 2016.

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