In a significant bandwidth-saving move, the MOOC organization Coursera removed the downloadable links from its course videos page. Here are the implications:

Earlier

Use the DownThemAll Firefox plugin/coursera-dl/wget to get all links to all course videos and start downloading.

Current Scenario

The student has to take a scattershot approach through the UI maze to reach the online video player. There is no single page with all downloadable links.

How does this affect the MOOC user?

1. Courses will be chosen wisely
2. Watch only what you need.
3. Salvaged Bandwidth - content loads faster

Workaround

I am trying to learn and use the Python-based parsing library BeautifulSoup to parse the html pages and extract the video links at one place so that the tools like DownThemAll become instrumental to this end again.

It’s only a matter of time that this impending inconvenience be resolved - await the nifty hacks!

Till then, Ta!