On the other hand, AMA's declaration could help increase funding for future obesity research. It could also lead to payment for doctors who want to simply talk to patients about nutrition or exercise -- time that's not currently reimbursed by insurance plans.
I don't know enough about medicine to discriminate well between a disease, condition, syndrome etc., but some of the points made in the article make it sound like this new designation of obesity as a disease is mainly to do with appearances.
I'm taking two Coursera courses at the moment - Calculus One and Pattern-Oriented Software Architectures for Concurrent and Networked Software. I'm very pleased with the material and presentation in both, but I don't think I could handle more than two such (relatively difficult) courses at any one time.
Codecademy and Udacity allow you to freely dip in and out of lectures and assessments, whereas Coursera courses demand that you deliver quizzes/assignments every week. It's hard to recommend one approach over the other -- with weekly deadlines I find I have more of an incentive to engage in the lectures and course materials, but the added failure conditions can push students to abandon the course.
The performance might not be any better, but the comparison would be.