Introduction to Recommender Systems
I can't judge the coursera course, but for anyone who is interested in this field and wants a gentle introduction, I high recommend Programming Collective Intelligence (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529321.do). It covers many of the types of recommender systems that the coursera course is likely to cover, and comes with a lot of nice Python code examples.It's highly useful knowledge too. I ran across so many startups that needed recommender systems that I launched a company called Algorithmic.ly (http://algorithmic.ly) to help companies without the expertise integrate recommendation systems and other types of algorithms into their projects.