Their strategy is to get you to use the their tools rather than teaching you.
Well you have to use some tool, and to teach a course everyone has to use a common tool, so what would you suggest? Your own favourite editor on your own favourite Linux distro I suppose? What if other students favourites are different? The class will spend its whole time getting their environments set up..
FWIW I’ve taken some of MS EdX courses and they use Python, Jupyter, R, RStudio... loads of open source stuff. See https://notebooks.azure.com for the typical environment they use
The ones I've taken did teach but were both extremely basic and much more focussed on teaching the tool than the application domain. And, yeah, they're pretty promotional.
Then again, that's very similar to many of the expensive Microsoft-certified trainings I've seen, so honestly it's still an improvement.
