I started using Coursera in 2014. The first course I took was The Clinical Psychology of Children and Young People from the University of Edinburgh. It was free at the time, and I remember receiving a certificate without having to pay for it. Coursera and MOOCs were still relatively new to me then, and I was mainly interested in the opportunity to learn something outside a traditional classroom.
After finishing that course, I did not immediately become a regular Coursera student. Several years passed before I started looking seriously at online learning again.
When I returned to Coursera, one of the courses that caught my attention was Learning How to Learn. A course about learning itself sounded unusual to me, so I signed up.
At the time, I could enrol in the course for free and choose whether I wanted to pay for a certificate. I was not taking it for a job application or qualification; I simply wanted the knowledge. Because of that, I decided not to pay for the certificate.
That course led me to others. By May 2020, I had completed six more courses on Coursera. Some I took for free, while for others I paid for the certificate or assessment access.
One reason I liked Coursera was the structure. The courses I took were divided into weekly modules, with assessments at the end of each section. Depending on the course, these could include objective questions, essays or PowerPoint presentations that were assessed by other learners.
Of course, there is an enormous amount of information available online for free. But access to information is not always the same thing as actually completing a course. I know that I learn better when there is a clear structure, a sequence to follow and something that keeps me accountable from one week to the next. The weekly assessments helped with that.
The most recent course I had completed when I originally wrote this post was Excel Skills for Business: Intermediate II, which I finished on 28 May 2020.
It was part of a four-course series, and I had completed three of the four courses. I wanted to continue with the advanced course, but I decided to postpone it because I needed to concentrate on getting my driving licence first.
This was also the first Coursera course I paid for. I use Excel daily for work, and I wanted to improve my understanding of a tool I was already using rather than simply collect another certificate. For this particular course, access to the assessed work required payment, and I felt the cost was worth it because the structure encouraged me to keep progressing.
At the time I wrote this, the answer was yes. What appealed to me most was not the certificate itself but having a structured way to keep learning subjects that interested me or were useful in everyday work.
For someone who enjoys learning but benefits from having a course laid out step by step, Coursera was worth exploring. I could easily see myself continuing to use it for years to come.