This definitely looks promising, as the interminable vertical-scroll is killer for our courses, and the min-max buttons on each unit are not intuitive.
I've developed simple tab views of document lists that don't force reloads because they utilize JavaScript and DHTML to show/hide DIVs that contain the contents of each tab. I think that would be superior to reloading, as others here have suggested.
I'm not sure I understand how the code decides which tab is highlighted by default.
The Flash slider is neat but not intuitive either, perhaps because the color codes don't match. I didn't even realize it was a slider at first -- it's not obvious that the yellow represents the active tab and that the gray represents the visible tabs. Maybe if the active tab were also yellow? Also, my expectation on a slider is that, as in iTunes or whatever, I can click somewhere else on the slider and have the "cursor" jump to that point.
Finally, we'd love to use an interface like this but rely on the weekly format, so we'll have to wait until that's available.
This looks exciting -- thanks for sharing it with us!