Free Online Classes

Coursera is a website that offers college classes for free to anyone who knows how to use the internet. They started this website under the belief that everyone should have a source of free education. They have almost 3 million users worldwide, and they are growing very fast. I have used this site, and I will tell you if it is worth a look or not based on my own experience.

Can I Get College Credit?

Yes and no but at the time of this post most of their courses are not applicable for college credit. Now there are going to be a few that are offered but it is a trial run to see if the site can be used for college credit. This is a battle that Coursera has been fighting for a long time, and they are slowly winning. The reason that they are not offering college credit is because they can't prove whether or not the student is going to cheat and they can track you because of privacy reasons. So that is their current issue HOWEVER there is an advantage to taking these classes.

What Are The Advantages

If you pass the course and get a certificate of completion you can use these on college and job applications. This is going to give you an edge up over the other people that are applying. So taking more classes and passing them gives you a leg up on the competition compared to others. Now you will need to realize that the website goes off of the honor system so if you cheat then you cheat, but you will have to live off of that. So when you go to apply for a job and you obviously didn't learn anything from the courses you said you took your employer will  disregard them and possibly throw you out for lying and being dishonest.

Have You Completed Any Courses?

Yes i have done 1 course and I did get a certificate of completion it was Principles of Obesity Economics and I passed with an 80% in the class. Now this was a short 4 week course from the John Hopkins University, but there are many lasting as long as 11 weeks. Not to mention that there are hours worth of work for the classes. It will take even more time if you are looking to pass the tests.

Should I Sign Up?

Yes if you are looking to gain more knowledge and are trying to get a better college application then you should sign up and take as many classes as you can. But if you don't have this kind of time then you should really look for something else to do because this will take hours a week for just one course. Otherwise yes take these courses and you will be glad you did when you have all of those certificate on your wall.