There is no argument that Coursera is one of the largest online education providers in the world. I recently completed the part 1 of the Android course and thought I would share some of my experience.
Not for the faint hearted
Yes, if you are looking for a basic overview of the Android system, then this may not be the best place to start. I would recommend looking at the official documentation on the subject from Google itself. In fact I spend more time reading the official documentation during the course than the course material.
Format
I would say the format of the delivery is pretty good. I really felt like being at University when listening to Dr. Porter (the instructor). His use of language is fantastic and very easy to follow.
The lectures are added to the course home page every week followed by assignments which are graded through an automatic grader. The assignments comes with very clear instructions. Generally the assignments are submitted in a form a zip file with requisite files in certain folders. Be very very careful with names as the automatic grader will reject if there are any special characters in the folder names.
The final project is peer reviewed. As a part of the review process you are asked to review others work as well. (Here is my screencast that was part of the submission.)
Quality
I think the material is pretty good. You are expected invest about 4/5 hours a week on the material. However I think you would need to invest more time if you are really interested in learning the platform. I started the course not simply to "pass" a course, but to learn. Therefore spend more time reading questions in StackOverflow and official Google documentation than the lecture material.
Final words
There are alternative courses offered by Udacity too. Once you start on the Android journey, I would recommend looking at other courses simply to enhance and solidify your knowledge.
Score
My score is 4/5.
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