Coursera Blog

Thank you all for the discussion. I am on the support team at Coursera and wanted to share the official response we posted on the Coursera Junkie blog below.

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Hi Kathryn and readers,

My name is Hannah, and I’m on the support team here at Coursera. We’re glad that you raised this concern, and we sincerely apologize for any confusion around our policies.

We are fully committed to our mission of providing universal access to the world's best education. As such, we continue to offer free and open access to all courses. We also offer learners the option to earn Verified Certificates, which provide official recognition from Coursera and the partner institution offering the course and formally showcases their achievements. Our robust financial aid program offers full support to learners who can demonstrate that the registration fee for a Verified Certificate is beyond their financial means.

Coursera's free certificates, also called Statements of Accomplishment, were designed before we made Verified Certificates available. Over time, we noticed confusion regarding the relative significance of the free certificate and the Verified Certificate. The latter is an official document, while the former is an unofficial, unverified memento of the course. We chose to phase out Statements of Accomplishment in order to better distinguish the official status of the Verified Certificate.

Last November, we published a blog post…

Well the UoL one is done by distance and is theoretically open to anyone who can make it to their exam centers (~30 across Canada), not just those resident in the UK.

Or you could take the foundations of comp sci from edX[1] and/or the credited Coursera courses[2](you won't be getting a CS degree without at least a reasonable amount of maths and stats) with a view to 1) completing a degree mostly that way over the next few years as more like them become available with a finishing year or two somewhere that accepts the credits, or 2) using just a few of those courses and a reference/letter to gain mature entry to UoT (bypassing highschool requirements) or something like that with the understanding being that if you can motivate yourself to complete them, then you will be able to complete UoT and it will therefore be worth the money in increased earning capacity.

[1]https://www.edx.org/xseries

[2]http://blog.coursera.org/post/42486198362/five-courses-receive-college-credit-recommendations

Hi everyone - I work at Coursera and wanted to share a blog post that should help clear up some misunderstandings about where courses from our old platform will go after June 30th:

https://blog.coursera.org/post/145882467032

The most important thing to know is that hundreds of courses will NOT disappear from Coursera. The vast majority of courses have already or will be updated and transitioned to our new platform in the coming months. Please read the blog post for more detailed information.

I'd also like to address questions around the payment model on our new platform. Coursera is 100% committed to our mission of providing universal access to education, and the move to our new platform does not in any way affect our mission. Anyone who demonstrates that they are unable to afford the cost of a course or Specialization can apply for financial aid. You can learn more about our financial aid program here:

https://blog.coursera.org/post/131756940057

Here is Coursera's official response: http://blog.coursera.org/post/96686805237/response-to-reported-vulnerability-in-instructor-access.

We have already implemented fixes and mitigation strategies for all of the vulnerabilities - including completely disabling type-ahead hinting for email address on our instructor interfaces (instructors must now enter the complete email address of a learner in order to manually enroll him or her in the instructor's course) and rate limiting and referrer header checking on APIs to slow down and stop enumeration attacks by third parties to discover learner enrollment status for courses.

Finally, we would like to thank Dr. Mayer for reporting these security problems and helping us make Coursera a more secure and privacy conscious platform for our learners.

> what broad specialty I'd like to pursue and someone else with the knowledge tells me what specific courses to take

FWIW, Coursera has a "Learning Path" feature [0] that, after you answer some questions and choose a "career", gives you a decent list of classes to take. At least the list I was given was estimated to take ~9 months. It'd be nice if something similar existed that's external to Coursera, too.

[0] https://blog.coursera.org/new-coursera-start-finish-learning-paths-starting-new-career/