1.5x is definitely doable for this kind of lecture content when the audio quality is good and you are familiar with the speaker. Some of the experts videos are Skype calls, and the audio is worse and the speaker is new, so I'm having to do those at 1x speed. A 1.25x option would be nice.
I hear 1.25x is fairly optimal for watching MOOC videos so I opted into the Youtube HTML 5 beta according to the provided instructions to get faster than 1x video playback. That's nice, I didn't know Youtube had an HTML 5 test going on. Flash sucks.
Turns out Youtube doesn't offer 1.25, just 1.5. And turns out I only get the HTML 5 version by clicking the "Watch on Youtube" link in the MOOC, rather than seeing it in the MOOC. Neither is ideal but I'll see how it goes.
Signup was painless, easy and typical. Really just pick a password and confirm your email address and go. I started about a week late so I'll have to catch up, but it was nice that they allowed this and didn't close registration.
The first lecture walked through all the features of their platform (branded "Complexity Explorer"). I thought it'd be a waste of time but the walk-through was very helpful. The platform is very nice and full-featured for something they've done themselves. It compares favorably to the big dogs like Coursera and Udacity.
I'll have to dig into it a little and see if it is truly something they've done on their own or if it's something white labeled off-the-shelf.
Glad to see the Santa Fe Institute is producing their own MOOCs on their own platform. I've long been a fan and was regularly reading their artificial life journals back in the 1990's. I'd forgotten about them until I saw the MOOC mentioned on the self-education subreddit.
There are ~4,000 students signed up for the course on complexity.