Coursera is phasing out free certificates
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Coursera is phasing out free certificates
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Re: Coursera is phasing out free certificates
#2I 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 charging money for it, but the primary purpose is the education, not the certificate.
Re: Coursera is phasing out free certificates
#3Does this really demonstrate Coursera "giving up on the dream [of eliminating barriers to education]?"
IMO, the important thing about MOOCs has never been accreditation (show me an employer who actually cares about potential candidates' MOOC certifications, anyway), but simply making university-level courses available without the overhead of actually attending school. And in that regard, nothing's changed.
Re: Coursera is phasing out free certificates
#4One thing I'd add is another comparison to edX. edX is a non-profit, while Coursera is for-profit.
Considering that point, I view the "bait-and-switch" slightly differently, but I agree more transparency is necessary.
Re: Coursera is phasing out free certificates
#5Honestly, 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.
Re: Coursera is phasing out free certificates
#6While what the OP mentioned is True , what i really think is that the real value of MOOCs is not in the certificate (it not that much important especially from MOOC providers) but the opportunity that it creates for people to gain knowledge , and personally speaking , MOOCs have changed my life , i live in 3rd world country where the quality of education is worse than you can imagine, but thanks to Coursera, Edx and Udacity , i managed to learn so many things , so what we should focus on , is that the opportunity it provides for people around the world to learn new things and change their lives in one way or another is the true factor that should be considered in the MOOC revolution .
Re: Coursera is phasing out free certificates
#7"Free MOOC certificates for most platforms? Forget about it" would be a more accurate title.
Nevertheless, the post content is quite accurate. I was immensely disappointed with Coursera's decision to remove free statement of accomplishment certificates.
On the bright side, It seems that edX won't be implementing a policy change. The reason is quite simple: coursera is a for-profit and edx is a non-profit.
The largest and most popular MOOC platforms are nearly universally for-profit orgs: Udacity, Iversity, Coursera, Futurelearn. Same with programming education platforms: Codecademy, Codeschool, Treehouse, Lynda, Pluralsight.
Putting it in UN terms: This is a reason for grave concern.
Platforms like Treehouse and Codeschool have superior learning UX and require monthly payment of $25-50. While this is certainly not much, the majority users of worldwide internet users won't be able to afford this price tag.
Dangers to public benefit will become more pronounced as soon as M&A commence and online education will become an oligopoly. Pluralsight has already acquired Codeschool for $x0 MM.
As Gibson's quote goes: "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."
If this massive disparity in access to knowledge persists we will find ourselves in the world predicted by cyberpunk authors.
Are we able to change this?
Re: Coursera is phasing out free certificates
#8In my experience over about a dozen completed courses and many more with less attentive participation, Certificate policies vary from course to course. Some of it is due to policies of the sponsoring institution, some is due to the business transaction between the institution or the instructor and Coursera. There's a whole host of branding issues that come with putting Blub State University on a course description. And good old BSU has a team of administrative staff that have nothing else to do than worry about BSU's brand.
That said, the Coursera Android App has become consistently worse. It wants to run at startup and once entered, never release the camera even after the app is stopped. To get rid of the camera-in-use toast, the app has to be uninstalled or the device rebooted. I came to the conclusion that unfortunately Coursera is headed down the road to finding the optimum between suck and income as a business model. Basically, it's given up on platform growth via innovation and is optimizing for Venture Capital fund liquidation timelines.
MOOC's are a model that can live off of exhaust fumes (in the words of Spolsky) but turning them into part of the people tracking infrastructure is simply more consistent with conventional wisdom and ten year investment fund timelines.
[edit:] On the 50% for a certificate comment, that's what Jeff Ullman does for his Finite Automata course and for me, it was non-trivial and required a lot of learning. There have been other courses where 90% and distinction was far easier.
Re: Coursera is phasing out free certificates
#9I 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…
> That might be an added benefit, and I see nothing wrong with strict requirements and charging money for it, but the primary purpose is the education, not the certificate.
This seems to be a very US-centric mentality. In Germany's mentality it's rather different: Universities are (mostly) free, but about anybody will want to see a certificate for about anything that you claim to have accomplished. So if you can't show some kind of certificate, then you won't believed to have any knowledge in it.
Some (older) Germans love to joke that some people mostly do further education while in job only to have lots of certificates to show. ;-)
Re: Coursera is phasing out free certificates
#10I 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…
There are a lot of different models for distance learning. Self-paced study is one of them. A more structured classroom type environment is another. The value for me was that Coursera provided the latter and the support of a cohort of students with their more traditional approach of timelines with fixed milestones on a fixed calendar.
When I started, the verified certificate was offered. It didn't really offer value compared to the unverified certificate. Coursera has done the easy thing. Instead of adding value to the verified certificate, Coursera removed value from the alternative. Instead of adding awesomeness, it added suck. That's its prerogative as a business and more or less the trend on the internet and in education. Adding value to the world is hard work.