I believe that you know how absurd that the video is frozen and then continue playing, again and again. But your upload and download speed is fast when you do something else such as playing Youtube Video. Dave also met a problem that coursera video loading is time-consuming, and I solved it. This is my solutions:

Change your DNS Setting

I applied Google Public DNS to my network setting.

The Google Public DNS IP addresses (IPv4) are as follows:

• 8.8.8.8
• 8.8.4.4

The Google Public DNS IPv6 addresses are as follows:

• 2001:4860:4860::8888
• 2001:4860:4860::8844

For windows 10, you can open

Control panel -> network and internet -> network sharing centre -> change adapter setting -> properties (right click your mouse, WLAN or Ethernet)

Add coursera hosts address

For windows system, file path of hosts is

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc

Open hosts by notepad, add the following addresses to the end of the hosts,

52.84.246.90    d3c33hcgiwev3.cloudfront.net
52.84.246.252    d3c33hcgiwev3.cloudfront.net
52.84.246.144    d3c33hcgiwev3.cloudfront.net
52.84.246.72    d3c33hcgiwev3.cloudfront.net
52.84.246.106    d3c33hcgiwev3.cloudfront.net
52.84.246.135    d3c33hcgiwev3.cloudfront.net
52.84.246.114    d3c33hcgiwev3.cloudfront.net
52.84.246.90    d3c33hcgiwev3.cloudfront.net
52.84.246.227    d3c33hcgiwev3.cloudfront.net

Conclusion

Sometimes it doesn’t work. But the solutions did speed up loading of coursera videos. Downloading videos is the best in all solutions I’ve used.

Reference

Why is the Coursera website so slow?

Google Public DNS

cedelo/coursera-hosts