The University of Colorado has generated about $110,000
since September from massive open online courses (MOOCs) because students are
willing to pay for certificates of completion.
The CU system partnered with Coursera in 2013,
producing dozens of courses for the MOOC provider, including several multicourse
units on a single topic that have been particularly successful at earning revenue.
“A specialization is a cluster of courses that ends
with a capstone project, and what Coursera has found—and we’ve found this,
too—is that these specializations, these clusters of courses are really
marketable and really valuable to people in the marketplace,” Deborah
Keyek-Franssen, associate vice president for digital education and engagement
for the CU system, said in an article for eCampus News.
The courses have been rated so highly that the business
faculty on the Denver campus voted to accept a Coursera specialization
certificate in data warehousing as a transfer credit that admitted students can
apply toward the 30-credit master’s degree in information systems.
“That lowers the cost of attendance for students,”
Keyek-Franssen said. “The business school understands that this is a way to
recruit students into the program and they have full faith in the quality of
the specialization because it’s been taught and is being built by their own
faculty.”
The Boulder campus doesn’t accept certificates as
transfer credits yet, but is looking into the possibility. Provost Russ Moore
told eCampus News he needed “strong evidence” that students earning online
certificates were getting the same level of instruction as those on campus, but
does see the partnership with Coursera as a way to introduce people to the
institution.
“In
a way, it’s a different way of marketing what CU-Boulder has to offer on a
broader scale,” he said. “[Professor] William Kuskin’s comic-book course, the
first go-around, had 40,000 people sign up, so that’s a great way to get the
word out.”
