Harvard's CS50x has a very loose structure. It's open until April 23 and one can complete the exercises, problem sets, lectures on his own time.
MIT's 6.00x has a strict weekly structure.
Udacity's courses have all eliminated the schedule and are now always-open, self-paced.
Most of Coursera's courses are structured.
If you want your friends to actually become programmers I'd recommend that you push both an Intro course as well as codeacademy for language practice. Codeacademy by itself isn't going to get you anywhere. The tutorials don't provide a solid enough foundation to actually implement anything meaningful. As a beginner programmer I went through every Python tutorial in < 30 hours. I used them as Python language practice, which worked well as a supplement to the core Intro courses. Both Udacity and 6.00x use python so they work well with codeacademy's python tutorials.