Coursera-DL

Build Skills with Online Courses from Top Institutions

Build skills with courses, certificates, and degrees online from world-class universities and companies.

https://github.com/coursera-dl/coursera-dl

Coursera is arguably the leader in massive open online courses (MOOC) with a selection of more than 300 classes from 62 different institutions as of February 2013. Generous contributions by educators and institutions are making excellent education available to many who could not afford it otherwise. There are even non-profits with "feet on the ground" in remote areas of the world who are helping spread the wealth (see the feedback below from Tunapanda).

This script makes it easier to batch download lecture resources (e.g., videos, ppt, etc) for Coursera classes. Given one or more class names and account credentials, it obtains week and class names from the lectures page, and then downloads the related materials into appropriately named files and directories.

Why is this helpful? A utility like wget can work, but has the following limitations:

1. Video names have numbers in them, but this does not correspond to the actual order. Manually renaming them is a pain that is best left for computers.
2. Using names from the syllabus page provides more informative names.
3. Using wget in a for loop picks up extra videos which are not posted/linked, and these are sometimes duplicates.

Browser extensions like DownloadThemAll is another possibility, but coursera-dl provides more features such as appropriately named files.

This work was originally inspired in part by youtube-dl by which I've downloaded many other good videos such as those from Khan Academy.