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Coursera is phasing out free certificates

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101–110 of 135 posts

Re: Coursera is phasing out free certificates

#101
post #92

Well that's what happens when you are trying to do charity AND make money - it doesn't make sense. Either it is free, or it is for profit. You have to choose which. Khan Academy is free. MIT Courses on youtube are free. These websites that want you to sign up, only be able to view courses at certain times, etc etc. Please, just give me youtube links and pdf/slides and have a forum for discussion. This is not hard, yo…

edX is a nonprofit, and they also charge for certificates. https://www.edx.org/verified-certificate There are labor costs involved in grading assignments and "making sure that you're the one taking the class".

There are two tiers of certification at edx. The unverified certificate is free.

Re: Coursera is phasing out free certificates

#102
post #5

Honestly, if someone's resume tells me they took (say) the Coursera Natural Language Processing course, never in a million years would it occur to me to ask to see the certificate, any more than I'd ask to see their transcript to verify that they took specific classes in college. And vice versa, I have lots of Coursera courses on my resume, no one has ever asked to see my certificates either.

In a sense, I agree: if the course is relevant to the work, the normal interview process will naturally identify people who don't know the relevant material.

But then, what about when you have far more applicants than time to interview them, and the question of course/degree completion really matters? Do you bring in everyone claiming to have a Stanford degree?

Re: Coursera is phasing out free certificates

#103
The shame for me is that I occasionally used the "with distinction" grading to push myself where I might otherwise think I've done a "good enough" job understanding the content. It really helped push me over the line when taking the "Mathematical Biostats Boot Camp" series, which I enjoyed. https://www.coursera.org/course/biostats

It's silly, I know, but free certificates were the gamification of learning, and I'll miss that particular aspect of the game.

Re: Coursera is phasing out free certificates

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some fields you just can't experiment at home (often because the capital expenditure is too high), think some chemistry, some rocket design, some metallurgy etc. You need to get a job to build your portfolio, and you need a piece of paper to get the first job.

This is true, but only to the extent that we're looking at the current state of moocs - which don't offer access to those kinds of equipment. When we start seeing that happen, we're back to the focus on ability to show work, experiments behind them, and the ability to describe the work in great detail to a potential employer in order to get the job. also , for new college grad jobs in chemistry, rocket design, metalu…

I have some very strong doubts that a MOOC will ever be able to offer the laboratory experience that you'd get at a traditional university (I'm not talking entry level). To do a lot of the EE work I've done in the past, you really need to know what you're doing, and a lot of the equipment, like a good vector network analyzer, is both incredibly cost prohibitive (new ones can reach a quarter of a million), and really take some expert knowledge to operate effectively (i.e. someone should be there with you to ensure the you don't break the machine). MOOCs may be good for CS, and they may be good for teaching entry level knowledge, because of the way the accumulation of very expensive equipment and experience/intelligence surrounding the field, at least for the immediate engineering fields I've been exposed to. I think it's still far better (if not the only decent way) to have a faculty mentor present and have a lot more close cooperation (as atleast I did when I was in university) when learning a lot of the specialist EE knowledge I got back when I was in school. I doubt you'll ever see MOOCs progress much in this regard, nor would I want to hire an engineer who did not have some level of hands on design and lab experience described above.

Also to deflect a potential counterpoint: most of the very expensive equipment will probably never be any cheaper because it isn't built in enough quantities, and for things like good RF equipment, everything needs to be carefully spec'd and machined, and the manufacturing is very time and resource intensive (you're getting your money's worth on a good spectrum analyzer or network analyzer, typically).

Re: Coursera is phasing out free certificates

#105

I honestly don't understand this. The article talks about revolutionizing the world of education and yet expects the online courses to give out certifications, like classical schools do. The free online courses exist so that you have free access to education, not that you have a piece of something that you can show to people. That might be an added benefit, and I see nothing wrong with strict requirements and chargin…

While that is correct from a purely educational point of view, it's unfortunately not currently true from a social point of view. There are expectations of certification in many industries, and the assumption is often made that without a certificate, you do not have the knowledge. In the IT world, this isn't really a thing, but outside it, it often is. It's therefore completely reasonable to expect a 'replacement for…

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Re: Coursera is phasing out free certificates

#106
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did learning new things change your life?

Although that it's not important how MOOCs changed my life , but i will tell you how , i was raised in a poor family (like really poor) , i got my first computer when i was 16 years old , and saw the internet for the first time when i was 18 years old , i always had hunger for knowledge and learning new things but never could go further than reading some old books from the high school library , when i first got the i…

That's really awesome to hear! I work on the Stanford edX team, but we don't see a lot of feedback from our off-campus users (even though there are lots of them). It's great to know that MOOCs are actually helping people out. In case anyone hasn't heard of our site (it's a little smaller than the more well known ones), we run a public edX instance at lagunita.stanford.edu and maintain forks of the edX repositories at github.com/StanfordOnline.

Re: Coursera is phasing out free certificates

#107
post #15
post #13

Certificates lose their meaning if they are doled out willy-nilly. Hence, Coursera has to implement (or at least try to) some sophisticated verification technology. This stuff doesn't come cheap; who's going to pay for it? Me, personally, I don't care about certificates. I want the knowledge; and that is still free. Methinks the OP is making a big deal about a piece of paper.

>sophisticated verification technology Haha. Coursera's verification technology is a joke and prevents only the worst cases of cheating. >Me, personally, I don't care about certificates What's fine for you is fine for others, right?

Haha. Coursera's verification technology is a joke and prevents only the worst cases of cheating.

It really is terrible. It can't recognize me, so I stopped caring about verification.

Re: Coursera is phasing out free certificates

#108

I don't see the problem with charging for providing a valuable service. If Coursera is valuable then of course the people who contribute their time to making it so deserve to profit from their efforts. If it isn't valuable, then why does it matter what they charge?

I totally agree with what you're saying. However, I'd like to point out that the initial intention with MOOCs was to lower barriers to entry for low income learners around the world. Adding a fee to certificates may have increased barriers to entry in jobs that require certificates now. This, too, may prove to be a trend for increasing charges in MOOCs ... who knows maybe in a few years you'll be paying a massive sum…

> "trend for increasing charges in MOOCs"

Exactly.

Re: Coursera is phasing out free certificates

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really great observation. For many people they have been raised that it doesn't count unless you get the certificate. That has elements of truth to it in the job market, you need an independent third party to say that you have learned the material. However, for just as many people it has really about accelerating their ability to be effective by rapidly absorbing the knowledge and learning of people that ha…

Coursera has increasingly pushed non-participation in a course's verified certificate process as a signifier of lower status as a student. Originally, certificates were a mark of academic performance and the business model was more akin to a dual license open-source project where the non-paying community was just the non-paying community; the verified certificate was solely a value added proposition based on the valu…

Private Universities and diploma mills have attractive business models for some organizations and operators.

Re: Coursera is phasing out free certificates

#110
post #5

Honestly, if someone's resume tells me they took (say) the Coursera Natural Language Processing course, never in a million years would it occur to me to ask to see the certificate, any more than I'd ask to see their transcript to verify that they took specific classes in college. And vice versa, I have lots of Coursera courses on my resume, no one has ever asked to see my certificates either.

Nobody asked to see my git account or any coursera/edx credentials either when I was hired. I did a week long interview that started with a phone call to briefly test my knowledge followed by the typical whiteboard interview, followed by work tests. However I don't live in some of these countries like India or Philippines where verifiable credentials seem to be imperative to even getting the phone call.
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