Founded in 2012 by former Stanford professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, Coursera is a for-profit MOOC provider that has partnered with 108 universities to provide free course offerings worldwide. The website, which has over 9.2 million users taking courses in a variety of subjects, has also partnered with the US State Department to expand its offerings worldwide.
Students learn in a Coursera course by watching lecture videos posted by professors from a variety of universities, including Duke University and Wesleyan University. The course is designed to be scalable, meaning that the class can support any number of students. Some Coursera MOOCs have even attracted over 60,000 students for a single course.
Course Format:
Coursera courses, which often last between six to ten weeks, generally involve the viewing of a weekly set of lectures and the subsequent completion of assignment materials. Students may have to complete a final exam at the end of each course. In order to maintain the scalable nature of the MOOC, the class assignments are computer-graded. In other words, participants completing an assignment for a math course would only be graded for the data they input into the answer fields, not for the way in which they completion the questions.
In situations where computer grading would not prove to be a satisfactory method of assessment, as in humanities and social science courses, students may be tasked with grading each other’s work. For example, in a first-year writing MOOC, class participants may have their papers graded anonymously on a scale of 1 to 6. By having the students grade each other’s papers, the course itself remains scalable because it utilizes what would otherwise be a disadvantage, a non-static number of participants, to complete the task at hand.
The classes also feature discussion forums used to facilitate interactions between students within a MOOC. These areas help to create a sense of place within a decentralized online course, enabling students to feel like they are part of a larger learning community despite being unable to meet their professor or classmates in person.
Course Offerings:
Coursera offers academic courses that are meant to correspond with actual offerings at a physical, traditional university. Students can take first-year and advanced-level courses in mathematics, the social sciences, the humanities, physics, computer science, tech & design, biology, chemistry, and education.
Accreditation:
Five Coursera courses have received accreditation from the American Council of Education:
- Algebra – University of California, Irvine
- Pre-Calculus – University of California, Irvine
- Calculus: Single Variable – University of Pennsylvania
- Introduction to Genetics and Evolution – Duke University
- Bioelectricity: A Quantitative Approach – Duke University
Students who complete the courses have their final exams proctored via webcam.
Antioch University has also begun to accept Coursera courses for college credit in the hope that students will be able to complete their degrees at a lower cost.
Certifications and Accomplishments:
Most Coursera classes offer a Statement of Accomplishment or a Verified Certificate for their completion. Students have the ability to work towards different goals and achievements online, creating incentives to remain within the class.
While the completion of a Coursera class often results in a standard Statement of Accomplishment, students can received a Verified Certificate by enrolling in the Signature Track. Through this option, students are able to verify that only they completed the work through the use of a webcam, a keyboard, and a photo ID. Students not only have their physical appearance verified by Coursera, but also their unique typing style. The webcam is used throughout the course to ensure that only the verified course participant is completing coursework.
The website also offers specialization certifications for the completion of a particular set of courses. Although almost all of these specialization courses are localized at one university, these groups of courses can also span across multiple different universities. In other words, Coursera has the capacity to develop an “interuniversity” curriculum that can be entirely completed online.
An example of such a specialization would be Coursera’s “Mobile Cloud Computing with Android” specialization course. Students complete four courses from the University of Maryland and Vanderbilt University through which they learn about the Android platform and how to create applications for that particular operating system.
Languages:
English is the most heavily-used language on Coursera. As of Sept. 15th, 2014, students could take 633 courses in English. The next-highest number was Simplified Chinese at 49, followed by Chinese at 45 and Spanish at 42. Courses are also offered in a variety of other languages, including French, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Italian, German, Ukrainian, and Arabic.
Partners:
Coursera’s first partners with Stanford University, Princeton University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania. Since the company’s founding, the MOOC provider has partnered with additional United States academic institutions as well as schools in a variety of other countries, including Italy, Japan, Russia, Singapore, China, Australia, and the United Kingdom.