Coursera, a company that partners with universities to create and offer massive open online courses (MOOCs), has announced plans to offer students verified certificates for the completion of select MOOCs for a slight fee.
Students are allotted two to three weeks from the selected course’s start date to decide whether or not they would like to pay the $30 to $100 fee and become eligible for a verified certificate. Those who pay the fee are directed to Signature Track, a new program that is capable of confirming the student’s identity.
The certificates do not include credits toward a degree, but supporters say they offer proof that a student has completed a rigorous course.
Then, students create a profile by taking two pictures via webcam: one of themselves, and one of a valid photo ID document. The program then creates a biometric profile of a student’s typing patterns by asking the student to type a short phrase, one that the student will re-enter before submitting each assignment throughout the course.
(Next page: What university officials think)
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.
“I want to say yes, except that the number of naysayers has been going down,” he said. “We hear from students that they wanted to prove to employers that they were the ones who did the work. There is value in the informal statements of completion that we were handing out. Employers were starting to take that seriously.”
Ng said that many students in Coursera’s user base already have earned traditional degrees, and that it is common for Coursera students to list their completed Coursera courses alongside their traditional degrees on resumes.
“Employers view that as a very positive thing, especially if a student didn’t go to a Princeton or a Penn,” said Ng. “If they can show that they can compete with that academic rigor, that means something.”
In addition, by including Coursera courses on a resume, employers understand that the applicant is keeping up with the latest technology and prioritizes expanding his or her knowledge beyond the traditional classroom setting.
Ng said that when he first launched Coursera with fellow co-founder and CEO Daphne Koller last April, they had a clear vision in mind.
“We felt very strongly that it [had] to be accessible even to the most vulnerable and needy people in our society,” said Ng.
To prevent interested users from gaining knowledge through the site “would just be tragedy,” he said.
As a result, while designing Signature Track, Coursera decided to offer a financial aid option to students who want to receive a verified certificate for the completion of the courses, but lack the funds to pay for it.
“It’s just the right thing to do,” said Ng.
Students who request financial aid are asked to answer a few short questions regarding their circumstances before being allowed to join Signature Track free of charge.
“We’re all about the students,” said Ng. “Every day we wake up and ask how we can serve the students. I’m excited to give students another way to show off their [accomplishments].”
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