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The point of Coursera (to me) isn't to pad my resume, it's to learn from courses not always offered at my university.
Surely the only point in doing the assignments in the first place is to satisfy yourself that you have understood and can apply the material?
You have to expect that they kinds of programmers this course would attract will want stick the code they've put hours outside of work into in some kind of source repository. With the ubiquity of free (public only) github accounts, I'm not entirely sure what else they expected might happen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's your work, you own the copyright, and it's totally within your rights to make it publicly available.
Sure, but if it's against school policy, the school has the right to expel you. Coursera is not taking the public code down, the owner is, at the coercion of the school. The student is making a value decision: continue the course or take my code down. If you can't play by the rules, you can't be in the game. I think there's a unique opportunity for GitHub here. They could give an educational license to verified stude…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but if it's against school policy, the school has the right to expel you. Coursera is not taking the public code down, the owner is, at the coercion of the school. The student is making a value decision: continue the course or take my code down. If you can't play by the rules, you can't be in the game. I think there's a unique opportunity for GitHub here. They could give an educational license to verified stude…
Github already offers free micro plan (5 private repos) for verified students. Unlimited private repos is a rather big hammer and might attract abuse. edit for link: https://github.com/edu
If it's this easy to "cheat" on these assignments, then maybe the professors should sit down and think about how to properly craft assignments. It's clear to me that traditional assignment grading will not work in an online/anonymous environment - appealing to a code of honor will not help if they want the certificate of completion to actually hold meaning. I don't have any actual suggestions other then when I was in…
So each attempt, even from the same student, would get a slightly different set of questions, and the dumbest attempts at cheating were discouraged[1].
I don't see why this couldn't be done for the programming assingments.
For example, the first assignment in this functional programming was "functional sets": empty set, singleton, contains, union, intersect, filter. It would have been trivial to add a few more (unionAll, containsAll, difference etc) and select a subset for each student, or something like that.
[0] alas, they don't seem to do this anymore.
[1] also, a "random answer + replay with proper solution" approach wouldn't work.
I'm of the opinion that the value of Coursera's courses comes from the learning opportunity, not the certification. I think they should simply allow cheating and not issue certificates. Alternatively, allow cheating and continue to issue certificates while letting employers decide the true value of the certificates. The point of Coursera (to me) isn't to pad my resume, it's to learn from courses not always offered at…
Rather than trying to fight cheating (which is impossible), Coursera should emphasize the point that these courses are not resume busters but for learning.
I'm of the opinion that the value of Coursera's courses comes from the learning opportunity, not the certification. I think they should simply allow cheating and not issue certificates. Alternatively, allow cheating and continue to issue certificates while letting employers decide the true value of the certificates. The point of Coursera (to me) isn't to pad my resume, it's to learn from courses not always offered at…
This kind of thinking really bothers me. They've gone to some pains to ensure their certification has some level of meaning, and now they want to chuck it all out the window based on the actions of a tiny minority.
Collective punishment is usually the product of lazy thinking.