This is the important aspect that most people don't think about when discussing this issue. A quick google search reveals 80% of Walmart employees are on government assistance.
I had a job in college where I was supposed to sell worthless "protection plans" on every goddamned product in the store. Second-to-worst job I ever had.
I wish the retail business model was more focused on making me leave their establish happy and satisfied than having made a purchase. Try to understand what I actually want, not how you can extract money out of me.
Good for you. I'm in the middle of a similar career shift. I studied food science in college with bright-eyed dreams of entering food product development. Instead, I ended up a front-line supervisor at a factory and it was the most miserable experience. I knew I was good at programming and I was obsessed with it as a young kid, but it was never something that I felt was "cool" to study and none of my friends did anything like that. (Girls don't like computers, that stuff's for nerds! And I still felt like that in college, even at a heavily engineering school.)
It makes me really happy to see other women become programmers after other careers. We aren't alone!
The way that Udacity does it is perfect for me -- work through at your own pace. Coursera has a couple of self-paced classes, I believe, and I wish that more of the courses had that option.
I think the majority of MOOC course developers want to run their online courses as closely to their university versions as possible, since that's what they're used to working with. It also provides a handy way for them to go off-duty, in a sense, if the course has a finite end date. Using their current pacing structure (which is incredibly difficult, as the OP points out, for people that aren't full-time students) allows the teachers to do something other than devote themselves solely to the course, assuming they don't want to just post an archive and leave it alone -- which would meet a lot of people's needs, but misses the whole teacher-student interaction, which is pretty much missing from MOOCs anyway. If they want to provide an environment that's like a classroom, with students interacting with the instructors and with each other, you kind of need everybody at the same pace. It would be nice for us if they could slow that pace down, but that would probably increase the workload for the instructors.
We're still early in this game. I'm glad that so many professors have been willing to invest the time into developing the courses, and I understand why they are currently set up to be conveniently structured for them. I think we'll start to see some improvements if/when the money appears in the MOOC game. Once it's no longer basically charity work for the instructors, there will probably be more efforts to work around student schedules.
Amazon customer service for their buyers is pretty great, in my experience. I broke my Kindle (stepped on it) and they sent me a brand new one, no questions asked. I've heard stories that their customer service for seller is terrible, however.