I know for me, one of the things I found very helpful about college vs just reading stuff in books, is that the social obligation to learn made it harder to be lazy and keep blowing off a topic. Perhaps Coursera is trying to replicate this w/ its "everyone together, limited availability" model.

There's a python script to download them. https://github.com/dgorissen/coursera-dl

If you start a Coursera course and don't finish it, you usually have persistent access to the course videos.

Not true for all courses (on Coursera), most of them will stop letting you access the videos after about 1 month from the course completion.

However, you can download the videos once the course is finished.

It's definitely not my experience that "most" Coursera courses do this.

Of my 12 completed classes, only one does not allow access to the videos. Some of these classes are 2 years old. The one that doesn't have the old videos sent out an email saying they were removing them when they re-ran the class with new videos a year later.