Coursera Commits Cultural Vandalism As Old Platform Shuts

mikejuk writes: Coursera has announced that 30 June is the date when it will shut down the servers hosting courses that were the first, free, offerings on its platform. The new model isn't just a revised interface, it is also a new monetization model, and presumably the decision to throw out all the original free content, by shutting the platform, is motivated by greedy commercialism. You could say that the golden age of the MOOC is over with the early enthusiastic pioneers doing it because they were passionate about their subject and teaching it being replaced by a bunch of "lets teach a course because its good for my career and ego" with subjects being selected by what will sell.
Closing down the old platform is unnecessary destruction of irreplaceable content. Coursera needs to rethink this policy that goes against everything it originally stood for. The courses effected are from the early days of the MOOC that are likely to be important in the history of their subject.
The most relevant for us, but far from the only one, is Geoffrey Hinton's Neural Networks for Machine Learning which gave a "deep" insight into the way he thinks and how neural networks work. Making it unavailable is an act of needless cultural and academic vandalism. Hinton is one of the founding fathers of neural networks and deep neural networks, Surely this is a historic document that cannot simply be erased or assigned to some inaccessible digital blackhole.
Something has to be done to preserve this important record — they don't have to turn off the servers just because they have a new platform.