I really like the idea, because I feel like having these things pushed to my e-mail will cause me to actually engage with them more than me just checking into them at my leisure.
A few ideas:
An actual account page, where a user can manage their subscriptions. The user should have full CRUD capabilities for their subscriptions...
(1) I should be able to see all the courses associated with my e-mail (in case I forget what I've subscribed to).
(2) I should be able to change the start date of a subscription that hasn't started sending yet.
(3) I should be able to pause the e-mails for a course that's already started and resume at a later date.
(4) I should be able to delete / stop receiving e-mails from a course if I don't like it.
I'd also like to set up completion rules. Let's say I want to start Chinese II after I've finished with Chinese I. The system should allow me to say "Start the e-mails from Course X after Course Y has finished".
I think it looks promising. Like the comment above, a searchable drop down, where I can type in the partial name of the course and it shows all courses containing that text, was the biggest factor in not singing up. Without it, you are asking your users to go to another site (perhaps after googling first), find a course, find the number, and then come back to your site.
Another idea to add a veneer of legitimacy...at the bottom of the splash page, have a scrolling list of recent courses for which users signed up. If you are just getting started, create a list of 15 courses you THINK your likely visitor might be interested in (i.e., "fake it tell you make it").
The date field only appears to accept YYYY-MM-DD. Making this clear on the subscription page would probably help.
File "/python27_runtime/python27_dist/lib/python2.7/_strptime.py", line 325, in _strptime
(data_string, format))
ValueError: time data '' does not match format '%Y-%m-%d'
Maybe add a link to MIT OpenCourseWare? As I wasn't aware of MIT OCW before, but I've just tested/inscribed (I also may have accidentally put a date in the past for my first email)
