Remember the halcyon days when MOOCs (massive, online open courses) were going to revolutionize the world, eliminating barriers of class and geography that were preventing hardworking, intelligent people from receiving—and benefitting from—an education?
Over the past month, Coursera has quietly implemented a huge policy change that gives up on that dream.
It will no longer be offering free Statements of Accomplishment to students who successfully complete (pass) Coursera courses.
If you’re a student who wants to share your achievement with current or potential employers, you’ll have to pay for that certificate.
For a while now, Coursera has offered two types of certificates: a Statement of Accomplishment (Honor Code Track), which is free, and a Verified Certificate (Signature Track), which requires a registration fee. Most courses have offered both options. The Verified Certificate (Signature Track) requires students to give Coursera access to their computer camersas, so Coursera can use facial recognition and typing pattern recognition technology to verify a student’s identity. This has advantages if an individual is seeking Continuing Education Units or similar professional credentials that require identity verification. But as someone who went to a college with a robust and respected honor code, I see no shame in an honor code credential.
I first noticed something was going on a few weeks ago, when I went to my course records page. Back in the day, each successfully completed course was listed with a final grade, a link to a certificate, and a button the student could click to share the certificate on LinkedIn. EdX still formats course records this way:
But suddenly, with no fanfare or explanation, the LinkedIn button on Coursera disappeared. Completed courses were listed like this:
I searched the Coursera site and good old Google for the reason behind the change. Was it permanent or just a temporary glitch? No answers were to be found.
Another curious thing started to happen. Coursera has an Android app, and I used to be able to do entire courses on my phone. But suddenly I was no longer able to take quizzes on my phone. When I tried to, I would get this notice:
This happened for every course, including those for which I had registered as Honor Code Track.
Fast forward to this morning, when I signed up for a new Coursera course and was greeted with this:
The implication seemed clear: Coursera was no longer offering free certificates.
But how could that be? I hadn’t received an email from Coursera about the policy change. There was no announcement on the front page of the website. Nothing on Twitter. Zilch on the Coursera blog. Even a Google news search didn’t turn up anything about a new policy.
In short, none of the communication that should happen around such a big change had happened.
Maybe it was just a misleading sales pitch? Perhaps Coursera is desperate for cash, and therefore has chosen to imply that students can only get a certificate if they pay? That thought didn’t give me any comfort. Bait-and-switch doesn’t belong in education.
At first, though, it did look like a bait-and-switch. After completing registration for the above course, I went to its grading and logistics page, which said,
“The Statements of Accomplishment (free) and Verified Certificates (signature track) will be provided to all those who achieve 50% or higher grade, and will be released within 1-2 weeks after the final submission deadline closes. Everyone will be notified by email when they are ready. You will be able to download the certificate from your course records after they are released.”
I’ll refrain from commenting about my chagrin at learning you only need a 50% to pass the course, and instead focus on the fact that, despite the above notice I received when signing up, it does seem to be offering free Statements of Accomplishment.
But what about other courses? I started randomly registering for a bunch of different ones. All gave me just two options:
- Full course with Certificate – USD $49
- No certificate
When I went to those courses’ logistics pages, some mentioned Statements of Accomplishment. Others did not.
I did more searching on the Coursera website and finally found this:
“Most Coursera courses offer the option to purchase a Verified Certificate, a shareable way to show your progress on Coursera. Some older Coursera courses also offer a free Statement of Accomplishment to learners who successfully complete the course.” [x]
So there you have it. Coursera is phasing out free certificates. When and how this is happening, we can only guess.
I certainly understand the need for money. Coursera has employees and servers and a lot of other things that don’t come free. If it’s in financial straits and needs to push more people to pay, that’s its prerogative.
But doing it in this non-transparent way is a shame. It’s a change that alters the character of Coursera. It deserves more public acknowledgment from its implementers than it’s getting.
Coursera has a few decent arguments on its side:
- Course materials can still be accessed for free, so learning is still free. It’s just the certification that costs money now.
- Financial aid is available for students who can prove that the cost of the course would cause significant financial hardship.
The problem is that Coursera hasn’t made those arguments, because there’s been no public discussion. And even if it did, it doesn’t fix the technical problems caused by the new policy that end up making courses less accessible. For example, students who have old computers without cameras, or who rely on their phones to use the Coursera site, won’t be able to earn certificates even if they qualify for financial aid. This makes Coursera much less accessible in developing countries, where old computers and new phones are often the only internet access that individuals have. It also makes accessibility difficult for the unemployed and folks on limited incomes in developed countries. If you can’t afford a new computer, a camera, or don’t have access to a library with these facilities, you can’t earn a certificate.
In addition, Coursera is misrepresenting its certificate options for the “old” courses that still offer Statements of Accomplishment. By using the “Full course with Certificate – USD $49″ vs. “No certificate” language during the registration process of every course, they mislead students into believing that there is no free certificate option, when in fact there is. This could lead to students either paying for a course with money they can’t really afford to spend, or not taking a course at all under the belief that they won’t be able to share their accomplishment with anyone once they’ve completed it.
On Coursera discussion boards, I’ve seen mentions of some universities leaving the Coursera platform for EdX. I’d assumed it was a preference for the EdX platform, but now I wonder if this policy change is the reason behind the shift.
So, Coursera students, universities, employees and fans — what do you think about the change? Is it fair? Is it adequately transparent?
Let’s have the discussion that Coursera should have started long ago.
Reblogged this on Season of Plenty and commented:
Since much of this blog is about thrift, and I’ve talked about free and cheap educational opportunities here in the past, I’m sharing an entry from one of my other blogs about policy changes that make some “massive, online open courses” no longer free.
LikeLike
Education, in the developed world anyhow, has long been a “Veblen good.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good This means demand increases as price increases. It’s wacky when compared to the price of grain or DRAM chips.
That’s one of the causes behind the educational-cost / student-debt bubble.
Obviously one of the hopes of MOOCs was breaking that strange economic model. Coursera’s been nontransparent in their attempt to raise prices. Hopefully they will be transparent in presenting their analysis of the results.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes. It’s interesting how education’s pricing model is the same as that used for luxury goods, isn’t it?
I wonder if that’s one of the ideas behind the change, although my guess is that it’s for more practical financial reasons. I suppose I won’t know until Coursera speaks up.
LikeLike
Um, no. Veblen goods are things you pay for that you don’t need whose purpose is to show off one’s wealth, like Rolex watches. A Rolex does not do a significantly better job than a $10 quartz watch. By definition Veblen goods are voluntarily purchased with no functionality upside.
Higher priced education is not a Veblen good. One gets a meaningfully better education, more networking, and more opportunity as a result. Moreover, most people aren’t allowed to buy them. You can’t go to Stanford this year, or any year, whether you have the money or not.
One of the reasons one goes to Harvard, and not community college, is so that one doesn’t end up making screamingly obvious mistakes like this when trying to engage in commentary.
LikeLiked by 1 person
A Veblen good is a good for which demand increases as the price increases. The high price makes it a status symbol. There’s no requirement that the status or luxury good doesn’t confer greater benefits. But one doesn’t always get a better education with a higher tuition.
GWU didn’t improve its offerings. They were already good. All it did was hike the tuition—and demand for its education soared.
LikeLiked by 1 person
$49 for Duke University Intro to Genetics & Evolution. What a rip off.
LikeLike
I think $49 is a great deal for Intro to Genetics and Evolution. But that’s not the issue. The issue is that Coursera changed its model without telling students (or “learners,” as Coursera calls them) about the change. And the technological aspects of the change make the courses inaccessible to some students who could access them before—even among students who are willing and have the means to pay.
LikeLike
Just some short thoughts on the matter: Certification has always been a problem for moocs because without a confirmation of identity Certificates are worth nothing. I am not sure if this is a problem around the world, but at least the academic discussion in Germany about moocs has stressed this problem for years. Coursera has never given out “Certificates” for free only the so called “Statements of Accomplishment”. But many students at least in the courses that I took never really understood, that the latter are not usable as certificates. In this perspective I think that ending the practice of these Statements makes it clearer to the students, what was already true: You only get a certificate that is worth anything, when you have your identity verified. And that is something that was never free on coursera or on any other mooc-site that I know.
That Coursera tries to push the students into the Signature Tracks with technological tricks and that they did not communicate this change at all is really bad practice.
LikeLike
Thanks for your thoughtful comments!
There’s a semantic issue with the word “certificate” here. Coursera uses certificate to mean the PDF presented to a learner with a verified identity at the end of a course. But that’s a narrow use. The common definition of certificate would just mean a piece of paper (or other document) attesting to an accomplishment or qualification. The Statement of Accomplishment meets that common definition. I was using the common definition in my blog entry, but I can see how that can be confusing and muddle up the dialogue!
Unfortunatly, certificates aren’t technically worth anything even with identity verification in most cases. A few institutions offer CEU credit for select courses taken under a verified identity, but in all those cases, the student must pay an extra few hundred dollars to get the CEU credit—that’s above Coursera’s fee for identity verification. I know of no institutions that offer undergraduate or graduate credit for Coursera courses, although Arizona State and EdX are launching a credit program in the fall. And given that classes vary so widely in quality and depth—from the equivalent of half-day professional seminars to the equivalent of graduate-level courses—the value that any certificate (verified or otherwise) would have to a prospective employer is questionable. Taking and completing the courses may show a prospective employer or school that you’re pro-active and interested in learning, but that’s about it. And in that sense, a Statement of Accomplishment and a Verified Certificate are of about equal value from my perspective.
I think a better model for verification is encouraging students/learners to take standardized tests that are recognized by the educational systems of their countries—for example, Advanced Placement exams in the United States. Another option is proctored exams that have been approved by accredited universities or accrediting organizations. Saylor.org employs the latter model for several of its courses, which you can read about here.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This semantic issue has been the source for some criticism against Coursera and with own experiences in course forums, I really see why. Many students do not see that these certificates (mostly the Statements of Accomplishment) are of no real worth, while it is difficult for worldwide online courses to provide something more resembling real university credit. In Europe there are also some courses on Iversity.org that offer proctored exams with real ECTS-points, but this model is still experimental as far as I can see and needs much more cooperation between the institutions and the mooc-site than is needed for the usual mooc. The verified certificates do not go this far, but the try to account for the very basic problem of online accomplishments: verifying the identity of the person who did the coursework. So while others try to move the moocs in the direction of the universities by cooperation for on site exams, Coursera seems to make the bolder move into a future where mooc-credit can be worthwile in itself.
LikeLike
For what it’s worth, LinkedIn just changed their developer platform and have changed/stricter app permissions, the disappearing LinkedIn button may just be because of that.
LikeLike
Thanks! I didn’t know about that. It will be interesting to see if Coursera adds the LinkedIn button back. If they don’t, that’s okay, but I hope they’ll inform students/learners about their reasoning.
LikeLike
I’m grateful for the free, high-quality content. You should be happy to pay for a certification.
>Let’s have the discussion that Coursera should have started long ago.
Crap. How about YOU putting together a free high-quality class, without charging anything, and then start asking for stuff?
LikeLike
Hmmm … I don’t think there was anything in my article that said I wouldn’t be happy to pay for certification. Thanks for your perspective!
LikeLike
So your reasoning is: if it is free you have no right to criticise? If so, I think you are really wrong, you too probably, if you think about it.
LikeLike