I've taken a few courses on Coursera, including the deep learning specialization, and I thought the material was great. However, I noticed that in courses with ~5 hours of video, quizzes, and a project, the average completion times were measured in minutes. Based on this, I assume most people who received certificates cheated and didn't take the course, though I'm very much open to alternate hypotheses.

I heard that there is a 'trick' to getting a certificate for free ($) on Coursera: First you just review the course which is free of charge, and then after you're done with it all you start the free trial. Now you have 7 days to finish up the courses which shouldn't be a problem due to the reviewing.

So that could in part explain the short completion times, although I'm not sure how many people use this 'trick'. Coincidentally though, I've learnt about this trick in relation to the exact course you mentioned (deep learning.)

From Coursera Terms and Conditions[1]:

"If you complete a course during the free trial period, Coursera reserves the right to require you to pay for a one-month subscription in order to receive a Course and/or Specialization Certificate."

[1] https://www.coursera.org/about/terms

I took the DL specialization and it took me a while because I worked really diligently through every single thing and made sure I understood before moving on. It was purely for self knowledge and the certificate was super tangential to my aims. I noticed later that basically all notebooks were copied and out into GitHub and it would have been trivial to simply copy and paste all answers and get a certificate.

That made me pretty convinced a cert wouldnt be worth much, which is unfortunate because I really put in the work to learn the material. OTOH, I largely consider certificates to be a bogus signal, and even often negative, so that not really surprising.

I know people who freely admit (at least to me) of speeding through the courses and just getting the cert.

I have also done it for various unwanted corporate training. :)

So that hypothesis makes sense.

This is actually a rather interesting question because of second- and third-order effects.

Most people will tell you that a Coursera certificate is useless for getting a job, yet the folks at interviewing.io found it was very strongly correlated with interview performance [1]:

"For people who attended top schools, completing Udacity or Coursera courses didn’t appear to matter. However, for people who did not, the effect was huge, so huge, in fact, that it dominated the board. Moreover, interviewees who attended top schools performed significantly worse than interviewees who had not attended top schools but HAD taken a Udacity or Coursera course"

Why are recruiters ignoring such a strong signal?

My guess is that most people recognize how easy it is to cheat a Coursera course, so it is generally not considered valuable by recruiters. Therefore most job-seekers do not place any value on a certificate, so they will not be bothered to try to cheat to get one. So the only people remaining who complete the course are those that are doing it because they enjoy the subject matter, which is clearly associated with passing the interview. There is therefore a perverse feedback loop where any recognition of the high value of the course leads to cheating which causes it to become worthless (this reminds me a little of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle).

[1] http://blog.interviewing.io/lessons-from-3000-technical-inte...

My experience somewhat mirrors this. I've completed several Coursera courses on a variety of topics, but I don't advertise them on my LinkedIn or resume.

The reason I take the courses is because they are useful. If you put an effort into doing the labs, then you'll get something out of it. My approach is to try to write the solution to the problem based on the description, then compare with the solution provided to the lab. This ensure that I really learn the material from the labs. Every lab I've taken has provided enough time to get through it using this approach.

However, the labs offer the solution of the problems right in the description, and you get an infinite number of retries for the lab questions. So you can easily complete the entire course without doing any of the work.

So, the course material is designed to actually teach people who put in the effort, but the certificates themselves are a worthless signal of the amount of effort someone put into the class.

I've never asked those I'm hiring, nobody ever brought it up. Ages ago I asked recruiters if they thought it mattered, they only care if the company does. No investor I've spoken to thinks the certs matter either. I'm like 0/60 with my population.

But, I do think the coursework is educational.

It seems like it could be useful at the very end to show you a re committed to learning and staying upto date. Or diversing your skill set. In all honesty is probably value those certs ina candidate more than where they went to school a decade ago.

It's not very different graduating from a non-famous university though.

I graduated from SEA. Nobody ever asked about it or mentioned it. I'm sure they wouldn't even know how to pronounce my college's name correctly.

Lots of jobs have a four-year degree or equivalent as a hard requirement. You might not even have been asked to interview if you didn't have that on your CV.

Right, when I care, the requirements is just some 4yr, accredited uni. But, mostly I don't care about that either. Experience is my key metric. And for entry level (which I do a lot of) it's about a code profile and showing you can hack stuff together.

It's a bit chicken and an egg situation: if one has a degree, nobody ever asks about it except the very first job after graduation. So any course in addition to your normal degree will matter more because of what was learnt rather than the certificate at the end. Now for those without degrees taking coursera courses hoping they'll land a job,it may take more than just 2-3 courses, especially for the first job. Also,it depends a lot on the market: certain countries are obsessed with certifications and will be very happy if candidates can provide them,so cultural context can't be dismissed completely.

At some level nobody cares anymore where or how you studied. They are interested in what you can do. As in "What you can do for us in $field" And they mostly look at experience of what you have already done.

Did you learn it from books? Coursera? MIT? Less interesting than you did it here and this other place with this kind of success given the projects respective constraints. And that can often be a personal project.

Anyone getting too excited about the signalling value of the name on your school is looking at the wrong thing and might be a bit garbage to work for as well.

It's an unbelievably valuable resource to humanity.

I do not deny that it is great for learning. Just is that learning recognized by anyone?

Or is it something only worth doing for personal fulfillment?

Coursera has a very heavy pitch about employability.

There is no perception of scarcity in the market of online certification so they carry little weight.

That doesn’t mean you don’t gain valuable knowledge but it’s unlikely to be in demand from an employer.

There could be scarcity if few people could successfully complete the certification. The problem is whether it is trustworthy though.

I put a Coursera certificate on my resume - nobody ever mentioned it yet but I'm keeping it on there for now.

I’ve done it as a new grad because I didn’t have much to put on there. I think it definitely adds value. It shows them you’re intrinsically motivated to improve your skills.

If you’re putting it on your resume isn’t your motivation extrinsic? Getting a job, impressing someone, more money when you do get a job, etc.

Resume items that are largely extrinsically motivated, but seem intrinsically motivated, are a well trodden path.

If referring to resumes, every company is different. A lot of places like to see continued training of any sort.

The majority of value comes in learning the material & being able to discuss related topics during interviews or while networking.

I, too, am curious about this. Not just Coursera but also LinkedIn Learning certificates, etc.

This isn't that I would avoid doing Coursera but it might mean I'd opt for other trainings offered. For example you can get AWS certified multiple ways, but the best way is prob through Amazon's AWS training.

A lot of companies value some sort of deliberate continuing education. I doubt that MOOC certificates are worth all that much--maybe with the exception of micro-master type of things from name institutions.

For me as an interviewer, Coursera certificate in a resume is a "that's what I've learnt, please talk to me about it" sign. Not more, not less.

Not much now. But I do think that this trend ("any company that accepts any of their certificates as valuable") will change in next years to come.

I think they will become even less valuable than they are now. If the cost to entry and completion is so low and people are speedrunning the material, the certification becomes worthless over time.

Not for hiring but signing off on taking time to self-improve. Rarer nowadays, but more common in bigco. (Training credits, ...)

Just like everything in tech, it comes down to what knowledge and skills you can demonstrate.

There's more to it than that. If you're applying for a junior position with no experience and a 4-year CS degree, you will very likely get an interview. If you apply for the same position with an online course or two, you're far less likely to get an interview.