I agree with your assesment that many (most?) will sign up without truly giving it the effort required. I wish it was $20 - some token amount. To extrapolate metrics on 'paid' users vs free users on most freemium apps, the vast majority of people won't even open their wallet for a dollar. If you aren't serious enough to pay $20 for the class, you aren't serious enough to buy the book and do the homework.

I'm really glad it's free. Where I live, $20 pays a month of lunch or public transportation. Even if it were $1 or $0.01 it would exclude people without international credit cards.

What's the 6th word on the 3rd paragraph of page 89?

This will not even come close to threatening instructor-led education. There are a very small number of courses that can be automated in this way.

I also think that the instructors are going to be surprised when the 10,000 students come up with more than 25 interesting questions.

I wonder what happens for the students who need questions answered that aren't deemed sufficiently interesting or unique?

> Most people won't put a high enough value on a free class, especially if they're not getting credit.

Both Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig are Very Important Persons in Google (Google Fellow / Google Director). This is basically a free diploma to be put in the CV for any Google wanna-be engineer, if they can make it. I doubt even credit would be more important than it.

Well, even if you're not a Google wanna-be it's pretty cool. I signed up (for an update when registration is open), but I'm afraid I won't have the time to properly devote to it as well. If it's free of charge learning there is a tendency to let other things get in the way vs. prioritizing it because you paid full tuition price. At least that was my experience in college with the trust fund kids vs. the people that were working three jobs to scrape tuition together. There may be some selection bias there though.