Coursera Learner Profiles
- Matthew Harrington
Analytics
Lessons Learned from Coursera
Coursera have gone all-in on the employability aspect of MOOCs. Their user experience and user profiles are all geared towards acting effectively as a Coursera-based resume, which has significant crossover with the sorts of fields you’d find on a LinkedIn profile.
Honestly as nice as this is to help learners drive towards skills-based employment, I feel like a proper LinkedIn integration could’ve made most of this redundant. It makes me wonder if that’d be a strong marketplace integration to offer for MOOC use-cases to allow them to compete with Coursera in that regard. Use LinkedIn’s APIs to pull in relevant data which is then augmented with data from the site.
The “Total Learning Hours” feature indicates that Coursera is doing something to track learner time in courses, though as shown mine displays 1 when I definitely have not spent an hour actually learning on Coursera on this account, so it clearly rounds up and isn’t the most accurate.
Learner Profile Data
Coursera learner profiles are extremely tied to employment, and capture the following data:
Profile Picture
First and Last Name
Location
Pronouns
Gender
In addition to these there are numerous employment-related fields, such as:
Work Preferences
“What role are you looking for?”
Additional Info - “Help recruiters get to know you”
About You
Additional Links
Social media, websites, etc.
Resume Link
Work Experience
LinkedIn style - employer, start/end dates, etc.
Education
Credentials
Coursera skills-first learning
Collects different qualifications from Coursera
Displays number of learning hours spent on Coursera
The account settings page and registration forms capture the following data:
Full name
Email address
Timezone
Language
With additional options for account linking and name verification.
Learner Profile Page(s)
Coursera’s Learner Profile pages show all non-empty fields listed above. So when none of the above are filled in, a visitor sees something like this:
When completed the box it exists within is added to the profile page.
In addition to all the information mentioned above, the Coursera profile page also includes an entry for practical projects that Coursera provides for technical learners to demonstrate their skills outside of courses: