Coursera Review: Is Coursera Legit?

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Home learning has gone stratospheric lately, and one platform that’s been a huge part of it is Coursera. In this Coursera review, I tell you all you need to know to decide if it’s a good choice for your next course.

I’ve been using Coursera myself for several years, completing courses in everything from psychology to music production. As such, this review is based considerable experience of the courses and the platform itself.

There’s a lot to cover in this Coursera review. It’s a huge online learning platform, with over 5000 different courses, and lots of different pricing structures and options. There’s also a tremendous amount of material available completely free.

We’ll cover all of that shortly, but first we’ll go over some basic questions. Let’s start with the really simple stuff:

Whatever it is you want to learn, the chances are you’ll find something suitable at Coursera. You may even be able to study your chosen online course without handing over any money at all.

Coursera makes plenty of individual courses fully accessible free of charge, and you can pay an optional fee if you wish to receive an official certificate on completion. There are also free trials usually available on specializations, and financial assistance options for online degrees.

Coursera works with prestigious universities and household-name companies, including tech giants like Google, Facebook and IBM. There are accredited courses available that truly mean something on your resume. 

There’s no hyperbole in saying that what Coursera has been doing in online education lately is truely game-changing. Inc has said it could “change the future of work and higher education.” 

There are even courses you can take that Google hold in equal regard to a full university degree. But they take months rather than years, and don’t cost thousands of Dollars to complete. 

Top universities involved with Coursera include Yale, Northwestern and the University of London. Increasingly, large companies are providing training via the platform too. These include the likes of Facebook, Intel and Google.

Are Coursera Certificates Worth It?

Coursera certificates are certainly worth it if you choose an online course that merges with your career goals. Employers will certainly recognise real world names like Google and IBM, and universities like Duke and Stanford!

Will Coursera Help your Career?

Coursera offers courses that can directly help you career. For example, Google currently offers five professional certificates, in IT support and automation, project management, user experience (UX) design and data analytics. Google has stated they will view completion of these courses with as much prestige as a full degree.

To differing extents, there are lots of other Coursera courses that can help your career. Certificates that mention big name colleges are never a bad thing to have on a resumé or LinkedIn profile. 

Try Out Coursera Here

Some Background: My Own Experience with Coursera

I’ve used Coursera as a paying customer several times since taking my first course on the platform in 2014, back when Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were quite a new thing. (Note that some Coursera reviews are written by people who’ve not actually used it themselves, and are merely sharing their affiliate links!)

Most recently, I’ve been studying a specialisation in Digital Advertising Strategy, delivered by the University of Colorado. I’ve also taken other courses covering topics as diverse as business writing and child psychology. 

Every time I update my Coursera review, I seem to find something else that interests me!

When I took my first Coursera course, the company focussed on short individual online courses (In case you’re curious, my first course was in Child Psychology, and from the University of Edinburgh. I enrolled shortly after discovering my wife was expecting our first child!)

Nowadays, there’s much more on offer than single courses. Coursera is a different beast, and a much bigger one.

Types of Courses on Coursera

Course topics on Coursera cover numerous subject areas, ranging from humanities to business and tech. You can see the categories below:

The types of online courses available on Coursera broadly break down as follows:

Individual Courses: These courses cover one particular topic or skill and can generally be completed over a matter of weeks. Coursera shows a total number of hours you will need to complete each course. You can take many of these courses for free, with no need to pay unless you want a certificate at the end.

Guided Projects: New to Coursera, these interesting short projects only take a couple of hours, and give a quick overview of a new skill. A great way to learn something new in a little bit of spare time. 

Specializations: Specializations are curated collections of several smaller paid courses that combine to give a comprehensive overview of a particular topic. 

Professional Certificates: For many, professional certificates are the most exciting option from Coursera, delivering a recognised qualification from companies such as Facebook, IBM or Google. 

MasterTrack Certificates: These certificates, in everything from Big Data to Instructional Design, allow you to earn individual certificates that count towards Masters Degrees. These typically take from 5-12 months to complete. 

Full Degrees: Coursera offers full degree program courses too. Unsurprisingly, these are considerably more expensive than individual courses, but are competitively priced when compared to degree courses from “bricks and mortar” colleges. Degrees are delivered in association with the likes of Imperial College London and the University of Illinois.

One notable additional factor here is that you can study these degrees from anywhere around the world, putting education from these colleges within reach of people who wouldn’t be able to travel to the institution. 

It’s obviously great to have all of this choice. However, the complexity has made navigating and choosing courses rather confusing – something we’ll discuss more below.

Google Career Certificates on Coursera

The Professional Career Certificates from Google are part of the Professional Certificates Program at Coursera but deserve a separate mention due to the value they present. Google has invested a lot of time and effort into ensuring that these professional certificates do much more than simply provide you with a recognised qualification.

Google has committed to considering these certificates as equivalent to a four-year college degree when hiring for related positions. The company has also created an Employer Consortium with many of the top companies in the US to help ensure graduates of its certificate programs find good entry-level jobs.

The exclusive Google Employer Consortium hiring platform is currently only available to graduates in the US. Still, the fact that Google has managed to get top companies like NTT Data, Best Buy, Verizon and Bayer to commit to hiring graduates of the certificate programs is a really big deal. It shows that the Google Professional Certificates are effective in preparing students for a job.

If you are interested in starting a career in tech you should definitely take a closer look at the Google Professional Certificates on Coursera.

Pricing: How Much are Coursera Courses?

Coursera courses cost from nothing at all to “audit” an individual course to thousands of Dollars for a full degree. Coursera pricing is a complicated subject, so we cover it in detail here. 

Special Offers Giving Free Coursera Courses

Occasionally Coursera will create special offers which allow the platform users to take certain courses for free. These are complete courses with certificates and which are normally paid. So make sure to keep an eye out for such offers!

Individual Courses

As explained already, many individual courses are accessible completely free of charge, so long as you’re happy not to earn a certificate on completion or go through a graded assignment. This is known an “auditing” a course.

If it’s the learning itself you’re most interested in, this will no doubt be rather appealing. I’ve personally always decided to pay, as it’s good to have an official credential. 

You can hook these into your LinkedIn account, and give people access so they can check your certificates. One of mine is shown below:

If you decide to opt for an official certificate, you typically pay somewhere in the region of $50-100 per course. I had a look at one that piqued my interest while completing this Coursera review and the certificate was GB£74 ($95).

Obviously with courses where there’s a free “course audit” option, you can start the course and make sure you’re happy before you spend anything.

Guided Projects

Guided projects are very affordable. Those I looked at were offered at just £7 ($10) when I updated this Coursera review. 

Specializations

Specializations work on a monthly subscription basis, with fees usually ranging from $39 to $79 per month. A quirk of these is that you can take the courses in a specialization as quickly as you want. This potentially reduces the total cost if you’re in a position to study quickly. 

For example, Coursera’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialization is said to take approximately five months if you work seven hours per week. However, if you have more time you can commit to it, you could get the course done quicker and end up paying less.

Professional Certificates

Coursera’s Professional Certificates are priced on a subscription model, the same as Specializations. We have a detailed article on them here.

MasterTrack Certificates

MasterTrack certs on Coursera typically cost from $2000-5000. With some you can spread the cost over multiple months, and there’s the potential for scholarships and funding. As they are delivered in league with different universities, it’s best to check the individual course details to see what options are available.

Degrees and MBAs

It’s no big shock, but online degree programs and MBA courses cost drastically more. Typically you’re looking at between $15,000 and $25,000 for a complete course. While this may seem like a lot, it’s generally FAR less than you would pay at a physical university.

Coursera Plus

For those who plan to do a lot of studying Coursera Plus can be a great option. It’s an unlimited subscription that includes over 3000 courses. It includes Specialisations, Professional Certificates and Guided Projects.

Priced at $399 (or £300 in the UK) for an annual subscription or at $59 per month, this is a rather compelling option for people who want to do a lot of learning. Across a year, you could pick up meaningful certifications from both universities and tech firms.

Is Coursera Plus Worth It?

Coursera Plus is definitely worth it if you plan to do lots of studying over the space of a year. The price is a drop in the ocean compared to a college course. 

However, you’ll want to be sure that you’ll definitely do the studying and make use of the subscription. It’s still a significant amount of money to waste if you’re likely to leave it unused.

Is There a Coursera Free Trial?

You can grab a free trial of Coursera Plus, or any of the certificates and specializations, for seven days. There’s also a 14 day money back guarantee on Coursera Plus. Do be aware that you will start to be charged after the 7 day free trial, so be sure to remember to cancel if you don’t wish to continue. 

Taking Courses on Coursera

If you are applying to a certificate program or looking to do a complete online degree then you should expect to have to deal with things like deadlines, fee schedules and prerequisites. After all, you expect to receive a valuable certification from a respected institution.

I think that Coursera reviews that are critical of this part of the process generally fail to understand that those requirements come from the universities or businesses and are fairly standard.

While it might be easier to have one standard procedure to enrol in all of the different courses and programs available on Coursera, this would probably mean limiting the opportunities that the platform has to offer.

Personally, I think Coursera has implemented the best solution available – require the least possible to enrol for each course. Any possible confusion or frustration that additional requirements might cause is more than made up for by the fact that the platform has some truly unique high-quality offerings at unbeatable prices.

Choosing a Course

Choosing a course on Coursera can be rather daunting. There are many different options and payment models, and the pricing isn’t particularly clear. The fact you can audit many courses free of charge is a great help, as you can have a really good look at what you’re signing up to before handing over any money. 

Thankfully the search facilities are very good, and it’s easy to drill down through the thousands of courses to come up with a shortlist of what interests you. If you go for Coursera Plus, you get many courses included, so you’re free to pick and choose at no extra cost. 

The Course Interface

We’ve focused on the facts and practicalities so far, so the next part of this Coursera review looks at what it’s actually like to take courses on the platform.

I’ve taken several courses on Coursera, spanning everything from psychology to business writing. It appears to me that the institutions and companies creating the courses have plenty of flexibility in how they create each course.

However, typically, you’re looking at a mixture of video lectures, notes and assessment quizzes. The interface also give you access to course-specific discussion forums where you can interact with fellow students.

Another way you interact with fellow students, on some courses, is via peer reviewed assessments. I’m not an enormous fan of these, as they can put you at the mercy of another student’s accuracy and reliability!

There’s more sophistication involved if you opt for a specialization or an online degree. Here you have marked projects, readings, graded assignments, practice exercises and more.

The quality of courses is consistent. Everything is high quality, slick and well put together, and the course forums are surprisingly lively. I guess this shouldn’t actually be a surprise given the millions of people using Coursera’s online platform, but it does make a difference and contributes to the community feel.

There’s also a Coursera mobile app for iOS and Android, which means you have easy access should you wish to study on the move or even in the bath – something I may have taken advantage of on a few occasions!

Obviously not every course on Coursera is equal. Some tutors are more engaging than others, and the reality is that you’ll inevitably enjoy different courses and modules to differing degrees. That said, I’ve been happy with the overall quality of all the courses I’ve taken.

Most importantly, I’ve learned what I set out to in each case – which is surely the most vital thing.

Recommended Coursera Courses

So many courses are available on Coursera that your best bet is to have a really good dig around the site for something that interests you personally. If you’re a freelancer, Lyn also put together an article on some of the courses she thought were most appealing.

Here’s a handful of courses that have caught my eye while writing and updating my Coursera review. 

I’ve picked out things that I know many of our readers are interested in, so hopefully there’ll be something that catches your eye.

Digital Advertising Strategy

Digital advertising, especially on social media, is a big deal these days. I personally signed up to this course to learn about paid advertising options for this very site. 

I would also point out the value of digital marketing skills on the freelance job market. There’s a lot to learn about this field, and plenty of demand for those with the knowledge. 

Viral Marketing and How to Craft Contagious Content

This single Coursera course grabbed my attention instantly because it’s based on a book on writing “contagious” content that I read some time ago. I have long been recommending it to anyone who will listen…

It’ll about creating content that people will want to share, and is invaluable for writers and bloggers of any experience level. It’s also one of the Coursera courses that you can complete in its entirety for free, with an optional certificate if you want to pay for it.

Google IT Support Professional Certificate

One (now small) facet of my own freelance existence is providing IT support and consultancy. It used to be my primary business, and I’ve written about it in detail here. This Coursera specialization is perfect for people wanting to go into that kind of work – work that I can vouch there is demand for in the real world.

Described as “the launchpad to an IT career,” the specialization takes around 3-6 months to complete, with five individual courses spanning skills like systems admin, cybersecurity and networking fundamentals. If something like this had been on offer when I started my own IT career you wouldn’t have been able to hold me back!

The Science of Well-Being

As someone with sporadic mental health issues (discussed here) I’m very much into learning as much as I can about self-care, personal development and well-being, especially when it comes from a factual and scientific standpoint. Success tends to come naturally in the wake of sound mental health, just as poor mental health can act as a road-block.

The Science of Well Being is a single course, delivered in association with Yale. It takes ten weeks, has fabulous reviews, and is another course you can take for free, with an optional certificate. I particularly enjoyed the video lectures on this one.

IBM Data Science Professional Certificate

This “professional certificate” works in the same way as a specialization. You can complete it over the course of ten months if you commit approximately five hours per week.

It teaches you skills around data vizualisation and machine learning – HUGE areas of information technology where knowledge is in high demand and the jobs are lucrative.

Don’t worry, however, if those terms fly straight over your head, because the course is said to be suitable for those with no existing experience of computer science and programming.

As well as coming with a Coursera certificate, this one also awards successful students with a “digital badge from IBM” – a pretty prestigious thing to paste onto your website, resume or LinkedIn profile.

Tips for Choosing the Best Coursera Courses

In case you skipped the segment of this Coursera review on “Taking Courses on Coursera” or simply want a little more help with finding the perfect course, we have put together some tips for you.

After all, on a platform this big you need some kind of strategy in order to find great courses without wasting a lot of time.

1. Get clear about what you want to learn. This is the most important step. There are lots of really good courses available but the majority will probably not align with your personal development goals.
2. Make good use of the filter feature on Coursera. Aside from selecting a category such as computer science, you can filter for specific skills, job titles, levels, languages and course type.
3. Take the time to carefully read the About page for each course. Once you have narrowed down your options, it is time to invest some effort into investigating those that remain. You can find out a lot by reading the About page, including the skills you will gain and the learner career outcomes.
4. Check out the Instructor. Coursera provides some basic biographic information about the course instructors but, particularly if you are embarking on a degree program, it is worth doing a little more research. Coursera often provides links to the instructor’s personal websites or social media and you can always do a little investigating of your own with the help of the internet.
5. Review the Syllabus. This might seem will like overkill if the About page was very thorough, but trust me. The Syllabus will help you understand how the course will be structured and will allow you to better determine if it truly matches your learning goals.
6. Never skip over the reviews. One of the most helpful tools in deciding if a course is right for you are the reviews left by prior students. The rating out of 5 stars is a good quick guide but do take the time to read at least some of the good and bad reviews that have been left. Here is where you can find out little details such as if the instructor really knows his stuff but is incredibly hard to follow because his voice is very boring.
7. Pay it forward. Try to leave helpful, objective reviews for those who will follow in your footsteps. If everyone did this it would be much easier to find the right course to match your needs.

Coursera for Business

Coursera has a distinct product offering for companies called Coursera for Business. This is ideal if you want to provide a learning program for a team of people, and there are options for both small businesses and enterprise firms. 

The basic pricing for this option is $400 per user, per year.

Coursera for Campus

Similarly, Coursera has recently branched out into offering a “Coursera for Campus” option, delivering training and new skills to university students. Since the start of the pandemic, Coursera has offered free learning to millions of students as part of this program, which the company has – deservedly – received positive press for. 

Other Coursera Reviews

Before moving on, to our conclusion it’s worth addressing some of the Coursera reviews that appear on sites like TrustPilot and Consumer Affairs. While some reviews are positive, several mention issues around payments and subscription fees.

Having used Coursera personally on several occasions, I can say I’ve never had an issue with unexpected payments or charges.

However, there are some very vocal people out there who say they have:

Reading between the lines, I think most of these comments relate to misunderstandings around the fact that Coursera provides some free options, some courses where you optionally pay for a certificate, and some longer specializations where you pay via a monthly fee. There’s also now an unlimited annual option as well.

It IS confusing, and it would be good if the offerings were simplified. But leaving a one-star review because you’ve been charged after a free trial has concluded seems a bit much to me. 

I’m sure some people who leave negative feedback feel they have a legitimate axe to grind. But the reality is that Coursera has literally tens of millions of members. It therefore seems inevitable that some of them will fail to pay attention to what they’re signing up to.

It’s also reassuring to see that Coursera consistently responds to comments left on the Better Business Bureau. Obviously you must rely on your own judgement, but I’ve been using Coursera for over five years and never had any issues with trust. 

Conclusion

I always get tremendously inspired whenever I browse the listings on Coursera and other e Learning websites. The fact that Coursera courses are linked to big-name companies and top universities makes this one of the best online training options. I personally like sharing the achievements on my LinkedIn profile!

Looking back on my early career, I would have relished the possibility of undertaking a learning program linked with the likes of IBM or Google from the comfort of my computer or tablet. The fact that firms like Google are now saying they will treat the related qualifications like degrees presents a seriously exciting career option for many people. 

While the full-sized degrees on Coursera cost a full-sized price, the specializations and professional certificates are good value. Furthermore, a combination of free “audit” options, free courses and frequent discounts mean there are lots of ways to get started by spending little or nothing.

The new annual Coursera Plus subscription is particularly interesting. It’s a significant commitment, but you can potentially learn an enormous amount for the money.

It is, of course, wise to heed some of the warnings I’ve seen in other Coursera reviews. It’s not, for example, wise to sign up to a subscription unless you do actually intend to use Coursera regularly and complete the full courses. You should also be sure of what you’re signing up for, and remember to cancel anything you no longer need.

As with so many things in life, this will give back what you put in. But if you want to learn something new, earn a certificate, and have a skill you can market and earn money from – Coursera probably has an option for you.

Try Out Coursera Here

Further Reading

If you enjoyed this Coursera review, there’s lots more content on HomeWorkingClub about free and inexpensive training:

• This article compares Coursera with Udemy, another platform that offers online training.
• This one runs through some of the best courses for freelancers and home workers.
• This article describes an array of other free and cheap ways to learn new things.