Online learning now official, five Coursera courses get ACE approval

Massive Open Online Course Provider (MOOC) Coursera has reached a major milestone today in its attempt to change the face of education. The American Council on Education’s College Credit Recommendation Service (ACE CREDIT) has evaluated and recommended college credit for five courses on the website.

Students who manage to complete certain courses from Coursera will potentially be able to apply their credits for a college degree. Coursera cannot guarantee all colleges will approve of their credits, but over 2,000 colleges and universities consider ACE CREDIT recommendations in determining the applicability to their course and degree programs, according to the online portal.

Getting a degree was never this easy!

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

• Pre-Calculus from the University of California, Irvine
• Introduction to Genetics and Evolution from Duke University
• Bioelectricity: A Quantitative Approach from Duke University
• Calculus: Single Variable from the University of Pennsylvania

Another course has been approved for developmental math vocational credit recommendation—Algebra from the University of California, Irvine

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Coursera says it will be working over the next few months to receive ACE CREDIT recommendations for additional courses.

Students who wish to receive ACE CREDIT recommendations can sign up for the course’s signature track through the website. They will have to take a special examination online after the course ends.

Charges for the proctored exams will range from $60 to $90 and the Signature Track will cost around $30 to $99. ACE CREDIT recommendations for two or three college credits per course will end up costing around $90 to $190. Students who meet all requirements and successfully complete one of these five pre-approved courses can 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.

Coursera is working with third-party provider ProctorU to enable online proctoring. With this association, students all over the world will be able to take special proctored assessments via a webcam at their convenience. Students in India who are looking to go to the USA to study can especially benefit from this programme, as it would mean getting credits conveniently.

“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,” said Provost Peter Lange of Duke University, “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.”

Not too long ago, we put together a list of online courses that could help you add a degree from prestigious universities to your resume. Besides Coursera, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Open University and Alison were a part of this list. You can read about these universities and the courses they offer here.