The Coursera TOS prohibit this. Specificaly, "You may download content from our Services only for your personal, non-commercial use, unless you obtain Coursera's written permission to otherwise use the content."[0]

[0] - https://www.coursera.org/about/terms

That's fine, but so why don't we? If the whole purpose of downloading all these courses is so that we can continue to access them after Coursera goes full moneygrub mode, surely someone is willing to sacrifice their Coursera account for this?

Lets think about it from ethical stand point. The kind of people who downloads and wants to learn is just a very tiny fraction of people in the entire tech population(Even most people in tech industry does not want to invest in learning). Their contribution will be significant. So what about the hard work the authors who had put in to create the course ? Don't worry their life will not be affected much(not like they will miss being billionaire). The only people who might get affected is the undeserved people who is taking advantage of intellects like the university.

ToS and even copyright law never stopped SciHub and LibGen.

An old saying I remember from my days in the ebook scene: "Those who want the knowledge will always find it."

As someone else pointed out, that is not allowed by the TOS.

But quite frankly... now that such content is not freely available anymore, I expect that to begin circulating on the p2p networks anyway.

Speaking of which: a few years ago there was quite awesome astronomy course, which I didn't have time to finish in real-time, and the content was deleted as soon as the course ended. I liked it wa-ay better than any other astronomy-ish stuff they had (and still have) later: it was more about actually modelling the celestial sphere and understanding the movement of the planets, than vaguely speaking about contents of the universe. Does by any chance anyone know how I can try and find it somewhere else? All I remember is that the professor had long gray hair and beard, which isn't really google-able.

I took that course and I really enjoyed it. That's why, I downloaded it and uploaded it to drive when I heard that coursera is gonna delete it. Here's the link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B64NfOIwa64BVFJXQzNhTDM3ND... Keep looking up :D

you're probably thinking of "Introduction to Astronomy" by Ronen Plesser. that course was awesome.

Yes, thank you very much. That's exactly it!

Yup, in 20 days when the content becomes unavailable, people will trade them like they trade... well, pretty much anything that they can't get easily by following the law.