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While the pandemic has shone a fresh spotlight on distance education, online learning is hardly new. For decades, we’ve been able to earn a degree or pick up a new skill using the best online learning sites. Coursera is one such site that’s been around for years. Coursera’s highlight is that it hosts courses from prestigious universities and makes many of them available to anyone, for free. In other words, you can get all the lectures and reading materials from a real class at, say, Yale University without paying anything at all. Coursera partners with private companies, too, to offer accessible education in a variety of fields. You can take classes for free for personal enrichment or pay for a course that results in a professional certificate, bachelor’s degree, or master’s degree.
As an online platform that teaches you through videos, readings, quizzes, and assignments, Coursera is straightforward and not exactly cutting edge. Some aspects of the interface would benefit from updates, and the material can be dry compared with, say, MasterClass, which invests heavily in production value. Coursera does well in supporting a variety of languages, with many courses taught in languages other than English, as well as closed captioning, subtitles, and a complete text of the spoken parts of every video. While the platform could use some upgrades and refinement, Coursera wins an Editors’ Choice award for making so many courses from real universities available to so many people for free.
Coursera essential offers three types of courses:
While some online learning programs focus on computer science training or other specializations, Coursera covers a vast range of topics. They include Arts and Humanities, History, Music and Art, Philosophy, Business, Computer Science, Data Science, Information Technology, Health, Math and Logic, Physical Science and Engineering, and others.
Coursera also offers courses that end in a Bachelor of Applied Arts and Sciences, offered through partnerships with universities. Some of these matriculated programs have a much higher cost than Coursera’s other programs and may have restrictions. For example, a BSc in Computer Science from University of London may take three to six years to complete with a total estimated cost of £10,693–£15,990—about $14,860-$22,222 at the time of publication. These degree programs also typically have firm start dates.
Beyond these paid, degree-focused offerings, there’s a vast catalog of courses that anyone can take. Some examples include Stanford Introduction to Food and Health, Google IT Automation with Python, Introduction to International Criminal Law, and Autodesk Certified Professional: AutoCAD for Design and Drafting Exam Prep.
Depending on the course, you may need nothing at all to enroll, just an email address to sign up for Coursera.
Degree programs require an application with the host university, however. You must apply for admission by meeting the institution’s deadlines, prerequisites, fee schedule, and so forth. Essentially, you’re enrolling with the university, but using Coursera as the platform to access the course materials, participate in class discussions, and submit assignments.
When a course is truly free on Coursera, you’re usually enrolled as auditing it. Auditing a course means you’re limited from participating in some way. Usually, you can’t submit assignments for a grade, and you won’t receive any credential from Coursera saying you successfully completed the course. Many courses, however, still allow you to participate in peer-review, so while you won’t get a professional review of your work from an instructor, you may still receive some kind of feedback from other people auditing the class.
For a fee, usually either $49 flat for a short certificate course or $49 per month for longer programs, you can upgrade from an auditor to an enrolled learner. These rates are far less than you’d expect to pay for degree programs, however—those fees are typically much higher and are at the discretion of the university.
It’s hard to compare Coursera’s prices to those of other learning sites, because Coursera’s rates vary depending on what kind of program you enroll in. The fact that many courses are accessible for free, and plenty of others for about $49 seems extremely reasonable.
If we look at Udacity for comparison, Udacity is more expensive, costing $339–$399 per month on average for so-called Nanodegree courses. Nanodegrees typically take three to four months to complete, putting the total cost per course at $1,017–$1,356. Some of Udacity’s courses are free, but the free ones don’t typically come with a certificate, similar to Coursera. Another similarity is that Udacity partners with major companies such as Google and IBM to offer classes that teach skills those companies want and need.
Skillshare, LinkedIn Learning, and other sites offer professional development courses, too. Those two in particular have more soft skill courses, like business leadership, but also tutorials for specific computer programs, such as Photoshop and InDesign. Skillshare has dropped its prices recently to be less than $30 per year. LinkedIn Learning isn’t available as a standalone purchase, however. You have to have a paid LinkedIn account to get it, and those run approximately $240-$576 per year. Paid LinkedIn accounts come with additional benefits, such as added tools for job hunting, networking, and recruiting.
For this review, we enrolled in:
Before you enroll in a course, Coursera does a good job of giving you details about what it contains. For example, you see a summary table with the most important information—whether the course is part of a larger program, the estimated commitment time to complete the course, supported languages and subtitles, how to pass the class, and an average user rating. You can also preview the course syllabus before enrolling.
Once you enroll, you see a clear layout of the course across all the weeks that are estimated to complete it. This visual timeline also shows when assignments are due, if applicable. For free audited courses, assignments won’t appear on your timeline even if you are given the option to submit something for peer-review because the assignment is not required. For paid programs, the assignments are mandatory for passing.
In our experience, the commitment times were not always accurate. The course on screenwriting, for example, grossly overestimates how much time learners need for the content in Weeks 1, 2 and 3. The video lectures and assignments in those weeks are extremely short and quick to complete. Other courses had more accurate estimates. Because you work at your own pace, you can power through material as fast as you want.
The only time you may be held up is if you’re waiting for peer-reviews of submitted work in courses that you’re auditing. In our testing, we saw work that was nine moths old still in need of peer feedback. In this particular course, each submission remains open until it receives five reviews. That said, you can still progress through the course and move onto the next module even if you don’t receive all five reviews from your peers. But you may be disappointed to not get sufficient feedback in a timely fashion.
Videos are used prominently for the lecture portion of courses. Sometimes the videos are only two or three minutes long. Other times, they’re 15 or 20 minutes. The video player has controls for adjusting the playback speed and toggling on closed captioning or subtitles in multiple languages.
Below the video player is a transcription of the spoken dialogue from the video. You can highlight anything from this block of text and save it as a note. When you make a note in this way, Coursera links it directly to the video. That way, when you review the notes, you can also jump to the exact spot in the video with that content.
Some courses also have readings. Readings can be included right on the screen, although some instructors will link to or provide the reference of very long readings, such as academic articles and books. We found it much more useful to have the reading material on screen. Links were sometimes incorrect or dead, and some references were not linked at all, leading you to hunt down a paper or book that might not even be required reading anyway.
Aside from video lectures and readings, Coursera courses can also incorporate quizzes. Similar to the readings, some instructors create a quiz that’s right on screen. A quiz can even pop up during a video so that you complete it in the context of the lecture. We encountered one instance of a quiz hosted on another site with the URL provided, and unfortunately that URL led to a dead page.
The screenwriting course included many assignments, such as weekly drafts of a working script. For learners who were auditing the course, peer-review is essential. Some assignments were short enough to be typed into a textbox on Coursera and submitted directly. Other times the assignment was to upload a file. The textbox submission could use improvements. When you save your work and try to preview it, you don’t actually see a preview of the final text as it will appear. If you cut and paste text from another app, the Coursera system doesn’t preserve line breaks and other formatting, although you won’t know this in the “preview” since it’s not accurate. Worse, if a peer gives you negative feedback on your unformatted, dense block of text, there’s no way to edit the submission once it’s in.
The screenwriting course encourages learners to join writing groups and follow one another’s submissions, which is unfortunately impossible given the limitations of the system. There’s no way to follow another person and their submissions. When it’s your turn to provide peer review (which you must do in order to have your submission reviewed), Coursera dishes up whatever assignments are in need of review, regardless of who wrote it.
To set up writing groups, learners use simple workarounds, such as posting their email addresses or Slack invitations on a forum. Based on posts in this course, quite a few people grew frustrated that the course didn’t provide a more organized way to join a writing group.
As mentioned, Coursera has good language support. You can find courses taught in a variety of languages, not just English. Courses also typically come with subtitles in a few languages as well as closed captioning in the native language.
Another feature that makes Coursera a little more accessible to all learners is the transcription that appears below the video. A small inset video appears to the side of the screen so that you can continue referencing the video if you need it. If you need magnification, you can zoom in on this block of text using your browser tools (the inset video disappears if you zoom in significantly). The audio syncs up with the text to highlight each phrase or sentence as it’s spoken.
Coursera does an admirable job of making real courses from renowned universities available to practically anyone. Even if you can’t afford to pay anything at all, you can get the same lectures and readings as a student enrolled in Princeton University, Sciences Po, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and many other prestigious institutions. There are also courses designed by private companies, like Google, IBM, and Autodesk to help you learn specific job development skills. While the Coursera platform could use some upgrades, its structure is sturdy enough and easy to navigate. Coursera is an Editors’ Choice pick for making education accessible.
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