Upon completion of the select courses, participating students will receive a verified certificate issued by both the course’s hosting university and Coursera. An electronic copy of the certificate will exist within a student’s Coursera records and can be made available to anyone a student designates as an appropriate viewer.
Coursera currently offers more than 200 courses from lauded universities such as Johns Hopkins, Princeton, and Columbia. Participating colleges anticipate that Signature Track will be extremely successful and will help to advance MOOCs further.
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“When we started offering our courses on Coursera, we aimed to extend the reach of our university’s intellectual strengths beyond our own halls, to a global classroom,” said Peter Lange, provost of Duke University. “Now, we hope that these credentials, while they will not contribute directly toward a degree, will afford students around the world, of all ages, backgrounds, and resources, an opportunity to have a legitimate credential for their work in order to advance their career or fulfill themselves personally.”
Joseph Castro, vice chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco, agreed.
“Offering verified certification for our courses will open up many new and valuable opportunities for students,” he said. “And charging a small fee for these certificates gives our university the ability to cover the cost of free course offerings, ensuring that we’re able to continue providing high-quality content to students around the world.”
Coursera plans to pilot the Signature Track program for five courses:
- UCSF’s Nutrition for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention
- UCSF’s Clinical Problem Solving
- Duke’s Introduction to Genetics and Evolution
- Georgia Tech’s Computational Investing, Part I
- Illinois’ Microeconomics Principles
Coursera co-founder and co-CEO Andrew Ng said Signature Track has been nothing short of a labor of love.
“We put a lot of thought into designing [Signature Track] and verifying the student’s identity while keeping it relatively convenient for students,” he said. “We spent months figuring out the right processes for letting a student verify their identity.”
When asked if Signature Track will help silence some of the naysayers who claim that MOOCs are a passing trend rather than a lasting way to deliver good academic content, Ng hesitated.
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