You are not understanding my response.
My original suggestion was that you register
only for those courses which do
not indicate "Pre-Taped" on the CVN course listing, because it is only those courses which you would be able to visit in person and to interact directly with the current instructor.
There is only one course in the financial engineering program which is being videotaped while it is being taught in the upcoming fall term. That is the final course on the list, i.e., the Data Analysis course (E4709) which Steve Kou will teach on Thursday afternoons.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/bulletin/uwb/subj/IEOR/E4709-20113-001/
So, if you sign up for
THAT course, then you can be pretty confident that each week's taped lecture will be that which Prof. Kou has just delivered. And, as you are located in NY, you can show up and sit in on occasional lectures. You could also sit for the exams with the rest of the students, which would eliminate the need to find a proctor and sit for the exams on your own.
Although there are two other courses offered by the IEOR department which are being taped as they are running during the fall term, neither of those two courses is applicable to financial engineering.
With regard to the other 7 or 8 courses which do pertain to OR & Financial Engineering, yes, it appears that they are showing videos from a prior year. So, regardless of whether that same course is also being given "live" in the fall term (for on-campus students) , as you point out above, there may be little, if any, relationship between what would be taught in the (old) videotaped course vs. the (currently offered) live course, especially when it is a different instructor.
As the only relevant Financial Engineering course so offered under CVN during Fall 2011 would be
IEOR E4709 Data Analysis for Financial Engineers
http://www.cvn.columbia.edu/review.php?course=IEOR E4709&sem=A11
my suggestion is that if you are considering spending $5,000 for a CVN course during the Fall 2011 semester, you should choose this one rather than the others, which are old tapes. Perhaps in a future semester they might replace the old videos of some of the other courses with "live" video of the then-current instructor; you could wait until such time to take the other course(s) in which you have interest.