The 4th course, initially advertised as available from 1st Aug, is now indicated as 20th Sept. I should not have been charged for this month by Coursera.
Their help center (which seems to be just a chatbot) seemed to view it as my fault for not cancelling my subscription, and then as the fault of the course providers (deeplearning.ai in this case) for selling a specialization that is not available to fully complete.
The MLOps specialization, like any Coursera specialization, stops taking monthly payments once you have completed the specialization. So, it doesn’t seem to me to be such a technically challenging leap to also automatically pause payments when it is clear that a customer has completed everything that can be completed, and unpause it once the remaining course(s) become available.
They have agreed after a very extended, stilted conversation (with a chatbot) to refund this extra payment, but annoyingly still seem to want to frame it as (a) the fault of the course providers, and (b) as some kind of one-off act of kindness by them to me, rather than what it actually is: refunding money that their platform should not have taken in the first place.