If EdX is anything like Coursera or Udacity, then it’s going to be a free, self-driven course with option to pay extra for a certificate. Each week, more videos and quiz assignments are unlocked. The PDF suggests that the load is 3 hours/week, which can be pushed to a weekend. Courses like these often run for a period of time and close/lock the material until the next class session begins, so you don’t want to start too late. Then again, they are very likely to run this course again since they went to the trouble of making it available online.
The EdX site tries to explain itself here: How It Works
Yeah, I meant the whole course, not the week to week lectures of this current course. Others indicated that they took this exact course before. So I was trying to figure out if the course is run every six months, once a year, etc.
Well, it seems like we can take six months to finish it, so my guess is two times a year. As far as I can tell there’s access to the whole course from the start (for this particular one) and it’s only needed to complete all the assignments before the due date.
I can’t see the history of the class, but I can see all of the content for all of the past courses that I’ve taken (or signed up for). It’s archived, which means I can’t get credit for anything any more, but I’m still able to go back and read it. If you’re worried about it not being available when you want it, maybe you can sign up for it, and then just view the archived course when you have time?
Any decent Japanese teacher should already be teaching most of this stuff to beginners, but it’s nice to have it all in one place with examples that illustrate the difficult-to-grasp points.
The original course had some more forum posting / peer interaction / teacher interaction, so it was run as a one time thing, which may have happened again later, then after that it became a self-paced class.
