Coursera

I like Coursera, though my recent experience with one of its courses leaves me feeling a bit mum. It offers some awesome free courses for you to review on a wide variety of topics; "on demand" courses that hold no grading pressure that you can take at your leisure from economics, to cooking classes, and of course, programming.

They also have plenty of (amazingly affordable) certifications "signature tracks" as they call it as premium content; whereas for every 4 week graded course you complete, you get a "mini-certification" (from what I can best tell) called a "Verified Certificate." Collect them all for a particular track and you can declare yourself fully certified with "Specialized Certificate."

However, like all courses, once you enroll, the pacing of a signature course can move too fast for you to keep up. Luckily they have a flexible and full refund policy that's easy and executable at anytime prior to final deadlines. Alternatively you can refund for a voucher instead; redirecting the voucher to another course, or simply to retake a withdrawn course at another time.

Quizzes are graded by staff, and peer based for a final project; you must help with the evaluations or it will affect your grade. Personally I always feel slightly irritated about grading penalties, but at least late submittal by a day or so won't break you. On most things. No, where I feel most choleric is the lack of partial credit on peer evaluations. Due on Sunday at 11:59, I once did three out of the required four evaluations, and then forgot about it until Monday at 2:00 am. Being a hard deadline, my saved peer evaluation work was apparently blocked off and wouldn't count at all, lowering my overall grade by 20%. Luckily, I was still able to receive a certificate, but the frustration of possibly needing to retake a course over this issue greatly bothered me all the same.

I also found the webcam requirement to be plagued with technical "iffy-ness" and unreliable for my desktop PC. It doesn't seem to register all makes and models perfectly, yet they require that you take a picture prior to every submission of your work.

Nonetheless, I still like Coursera and value it as a resource. Overall given that the courses are hosted by different universities and staff, the true quality of a course appears to be dependent on the instructor who is teaching it. I'll continue to dive further into Coursera based on specific impressions of specific courses that I take. But again, I can definitely endorse Coursera overall.

~Code Crunch Corner~