I'm not sure if there are courses that you can't take without paying, I remember that they sometimes made it really difficult to figure out if you could access the course for free (I believe it's better now).

Honestly it's hard to complain, because all the stuff is still there. It's just not as utopian and revolutionary as it once seemed to be. Or maybe it is and I should stop complaining. I just wished it was like wikipedia.

just the certificate. and you also get access to some extra things like the autograder in some classes. But otherwise, nothing is different.

Actually, I was doing some updated courses a while ago, which I started a few years back and wanted to finish. I could follow the videos and reading material, but I could not do the end—of-week quizzes without paying. This really put me off.

It’s vastly different for many courses. The exercises are often paywalled, which means you can’t put your skills to the test.

And at that point, you're just watching videos and, while people learn in different ways, you may be just as well or better off picking up a book and taking advantage of resources like MIT OCW.

Entitled much?