If you're curious to see what the coursework involved and what a verified certificate looks like:

You can view my course record here:

https://www.coursera.org/records/RxMP2uVCFbKvaqTY

And here is my certificate:

https://www.coursera.org/maestro/api/certificate/get_certificate?verify-code=6FE95U4VCA


It wasn't the most difficult course. Anyone can pass this class with distinction by simply following the instructions. But you know what? It feels good to be done with the first class of the Data Science Specialization.

Onward to learning R Programming and sharpening my knowledge of statistics!

Example of a decent Coursera grading policy and my thoughts on incentivizing actual studying:

"Here is how the final grade for America's Written Constitution will be calculated. 

In-video quizzes accompany each lecture. They do not count toward your final grade. They are provided so that you can assess your comprehension through immediate feedback. You will be able to answer each in-video quiz question up to 3 times. 

You will be asked to take three Mastery Quizzes throughout the course. Each quiz will contain 5-10 questions. You will only be allowed to submit each quiz one time. You will have one week to complete each quiz in order to be eligible for full credit. After the first deadline passes, you will have one additional week to submit your quiz if you missed the first deadline. However, your grade on that quiz will be reduced by 5% each day that passes. 

You will be asked to submit two writing assignments that will be reviewed and graded by three of your peers. In addition, in order to be eligible for full credit on the written assignments, you will need to grade three of your classmates written assignments. 

Together, the quizzes are worth 60% of your total grade. The two writing assignments are worth 40% (each essay is 20%).

You will have the opportunity to earn a Signature Track Verified Certificate in this course. Students will need to earn a final grade of 70% or greater to successfully complete the course, and achieve the Signature Track Verified Certificate."

-You can find this grading policy and other class content here. There is one advantage MOOCs have over most online college courses: complete clarity. You don't have to pay money or commit to the course in order to see what the coursework and content are all about.

I absolutely love this grading policy. The coursework isn't especially difficult since it is an introductory history (and law) course, but the grading policy is strict compared to other Coursera courses. Some courses that are meant to be provide basic knowledge of a field will allow you to attempt a quiz or assignment up to a hundred times. Letting students have a few attempts at an assignment seems reasonable. Most Coursera students don't get the chance to go over assignments with a knowledgeable instructor and cannot fix mistakes before making a final submission. To make up for the lack of human fail-safes, most assignments provide automated feedback on the student's errors. From there, the student can learn from mistakes and attempt the assignment again.

However, giving a student this feedback alongside one-hundred attempts with no grade penalties certainly gives opportunities to abuse this system. For instance, I could fail my Surveillance Law quizzes and simple copy the quiz answers in order to get perfect scores on later attempts. The students looking to just pad their resumes with these courses won't care to truly master the course material and will cheat their way through these assessments. This cheating won't help the students learn and will dilute the reputation of these courses when these students cannot prove they learned anything.

One way to curb abuse of these grading systems is to limit assessment attempts to a very finite number that allows opportunities for mastery and unique quizzes. For instance, three attempts would allow a student to mess up the first time and then succeed with higher scores on following attempts. The finite number of attempts would let instructors prepare three unique assessments that cover the same course material while making it (marginally) more difficult to simply copy and paste answers from previous attempts.

Or, the instructor can take a gamble and trust that both students and the Coursera platform won't have technical issues that spoil an assessment attempt (such as submission errors) and offer one attempt for each quiz. It is still easy to cheat, I suppose. All it takes is one person to pass the assessment and then distribute the answers to everyone else. Even then, some students won't want to risk their only attempt at a good grade off someone else's answers. Instead, those students will AT LEAST attempt to gain background knowledge of the course material before deciding to use someone else's answers.

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I wanted to include the below paragraph in my "actual" post (the above text), but saw too many flaws in the solution. Even with the very recognizable flaws of this suggestion, I think it provides good food for thought on combating cheating in MOOCs. 

There might be ways to counter this cheat-sheet sharing activity such as having Coursera staff create and distribute bogus cheat-sheets in order to dilute the reputation of sources that provide free quiz answers. Students will hedge against the risk of using bogus cheat-sheets by actually gaining (at least) background knowledge of the course material in order to ensure that their cheat-sheets are accurate. 

A couple flaws right off the bat:

• costly in terms of time
• identifying the bogus sheets won't be too difficult. The bogus cheat-sheets would have to incentivize people to use them while not giving students amazing grades. There would be enough good answers to provide initial impressions that the cheat-sheet is accurate but would also contain incorrect answers to result in an unfavorable grade of something in the ballpark of 60 to 70%. Keep in mind most courses require around 75% for a statement of accomplishment and usually at least or more than 90% in order to pass "with distinction." 

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p.s.

I got a 5 out of 6 on the first quiz of "America's Written Constitution." I studied for no more than half an hour and only got an 83%. These single attempt quizzes really did make me want to understand the course material but clearly I didn't study hard enough. Oh well, I'll just have to do better on the following quizzes.

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.