Completed my first MOOC, verified certificate and all!

I'm just about finished with my first Coursera Data Science specialization MOOC! While this is news worth celebrating, I should note that the course was just an easy Git tutorial titled "The Data Scientist's Toolbox."

Course content

It's a great course for those who have never been exposed to command line interfaces and forms of cloud computing. The lecture material barely skimmed over some broad data science principles and then went into depth about the Data Science specialization structure. Quizzes were based on lecture material and were pretty easy to pass. Basically, you will pass the quizzes with flying colors if you simply watch the lectures. The course project involved learning about GitHub, installing Git Bash, installing R and R Studio, and using Git Bash to push files (called repositories in the GithHb community) onto GitHub. In all, the course project was a simple but well detailed tutorial on using some simple software. If you're experienced with command line interfaces and Git, then this is a course you can finish within an hour. If you're totally new to this stuff, then this course should take no longer than a week to master. 

Coursera's verification process and its faults:

What wasn't so great about this Coursera course was the verification process. To be fair, Coursera's means of authenticating one's work is no better than the authentication process I experienced in a couple online courses I took at George Mason University. Some GMU courses would utilize a lockdown application that prevents you from opening other applications while the online test is opened. Other GMU courses didn't include authentication procedures for online quizzes. Coursera's verification process, known as Signature Track, works as follows:

1. Take a picture of yourself before taking a quiz or submitting an assignment. This photo will be compared to a photo of your driver's license or other identification, which you provide when you initially sign up and pay for the Signature Track service.
2. Type a phrase. When you sign up for Signature Track, you type a phrase multiple times. The patterns derived from the multiple entries become your biometric identity.

Certainly, this means of verification beats doing nothing to link a student's authorship to assignments. However, cheating can still easily happen. I could go through the verification process and then hand my computer to another student. Or, I can copy and paste code or essays and probably slip through the peer grading system used by some Coursera courses. 

I hope Coursera adopts a stronger verification process. Of course, the point of taking a MOOC isn't to get the certification but to gain knowledge and skills. But I would love to see MOOCs become credentials that can at least reliably signal a certificate holder's  tenacity to employers since some of these MOOCs demand quite a bit of grit.

Coursera compared to Udacity:

Nobody likes a complaint that doesn't come with suggestions for alternatives, but sadly my complaint about Signature Track doesn't come with seriously good suggestions. Coursera could more closely imitate Udacity's (another MOOC provider) model and charge more money for courses in order to provide more human support for the online classes. Udacity assigns coaches and instructors to students and arranges one-on-one tutoring sessions, so at least the tuition fees are used to create a human connection. I'm not very knowledgeable Udacity's policies and procedures, but I believe these connections create greater accountability when it comes to verifying that a student is doing honest work. 

This idea of imitating Udacity would ultimately mean putting verified certifications out of financial reach for many Coursera users, or at least make Coursera's courses less attractive in comparison to other institutions of learning such as community colleges. Right now, the courses that offer the Signature Track verification process are priced at $49 per class. That's incredibly cheap for just about anyone living in a developed country. Compare that to Udacity's monthly fee of $200 and keep in mind that Udacity wants to keep its tuition fees as low as possible while providing strong credentials. While $200 a month is...reasonably cheap, it feels like a few more added tuition services would set the tuition fee high enough to make community college courses competitive. At this moment, I don't have many good ideas that would improve the verification processes of MOOCs without increasing the price of verified MOOCs to the point where community college courses become comparatively attractive.