Coursera Blog • Five Courses Receive College Credit Recommendations

Coursera is committed to seeing that our courses meet our students’ educational goals, from simply experiencing the joy of learning something new, to seeking improved employment opportunities, to working towards a degree. To this end, we are proud to announce that the American Council on Education’s College Credit Recommendation Service (ACE CREDIT) has evaluated and recommended college credit for five courses on Coursera. Many students face enormous financial obstacles in pursuit of their degrees. We want to help more students enter college with credit already accrued and exit college on time, on budget and with a degree in hand.

ACE CREDIT is a recognized authority in assessing non-traditional education experiences, with more than 2,000 colleges and universities considering ACE CREDIT recommendations in determining the applicability to their course and degree programs.

The five courses approved for college credit recommendation include four undergraduate credit courses:

And one course approved for developmental math vocational credit recommendation:

• Algebra from the University of California, Irvine

Over the next months we will work to receive ACE CREDIT recommendations for additional courses.

You can earn an ACE CREDIT college credit recommendation by signing up for an eligible course in the Signature Track and then taking an online proctored Credit Exam at the end of the course. We are working with a third-party provider, ProctorU, to enable online proctoring so that students anywhere in the world can take these special proctored assessments via a webcam at their convenience. There is an additional fee for the Credit Exam.

Students who meet all requirements and successfully complete one of these five pre-approved courses may request a transcript with credit recommendations from ACE, which they can then present to the college or university of their choice for prerequisite or undergraduate credit consideration, to be granted at the discretion of the institution.

Duke Provost Peter Lange said “We are excited by this opportunity to experiment with new ways of using our MOOC courses to extend our educational reach and provide credit for students who would not otherwise have access to our faculty. MOOCs, often in combination with the creativity of individual universities, have much potential to open and enrich the educational offerings available to students across the United States and the globe.”