Coursera - Course-Level Assessment Configuration
- Matthew Harrington
Analytics
Coursera is somewhat a black box on the course setup and administration side of things, but some information is available through third-parties.
Assignment deadlines for regular MOOCs are relative to when a user starts a course, but there is no penalty for missing a deadline in most courses (what “most” means is unknown). Coursera simply uses due dates to motivate learners to continue and finish a course, as well as grouping their learners into cohorts for social interaction and peer review. These semi-arbitrary rolling dates have been shown to increase their course completion rates over their previous model of permanently open self-paced courses. Learners can self-reset deadlines to give themselves extensions.
Degree courses, however, have much more rigid deadlines, and late penalties can be applied to decrease or invalidate a learner’s grade if they submit an assignment after the deadline. The documentation implies that they do not prevent submission, but it simply doesn’t count towards the final grade on a course if the option is enabled.
Grading groups are the Coursera equivalent of assignment types, and can be assigned weights, as can individual assignments and assignments within groups. Assignments do not have to have a grading group assigned, and can only be assigned to one group. The lowest grades can be dropped, but only assignments that have been selected as being eligible for dropping are included - meaning that effectively instructors can exclude specific assignments from dropping, much like Canvas, but in the inverse way (Coursera opts assignment in for dropping, rather than opting out, which seems inefficient).
Grading groups and ungrouped assignments appear separately in the learners’ quiz page, and the UX is extremely poor, for example, this is the ungrouped content from a course which features some grouped content at the end of each unit/week:
And then scrolling down we find the grouped content:
As you can see, the ungrouped content is shown in the order it appears in the course, and then the grouped content appears at the bottom in its own order, which isn’t great.
The grades assigned within groups are described as “weighted averages” of grades within the groups, which seems extremely unusual, but without knowing more about how Coursera grades are calculated, I cannot say for sure what this means. This could make the individual weights of problems within weighted groups extremely unusual, but it could just be a phrasing issue in their documentation.
Grading on Coursera courses is a simple pass/fail. Previously, they offered a special certificate of accomplishment “with distinction”, and the cutoff for these can be set by staff. This is no longer available, and has been replaced by what they call Honors Assignments, which are optional additional assignments which can be added to upgrade a purchased certificate to an honors certificate if the optional content is completed. Honors assignments do not affect the overall grade of a course, so their completion status is entirely binary - the honors assignment has been successfully completed, or it has not.
Overall, Coursera is heavily aimed at the academic MOOC use-case, and doesn’t focus on much else. All mentions of the degree-specific functionality they offer are as optionally enabled extras - hastily bolted-on functionality to support those needs and override the default MOOC behaviour, rather than their core course model, which makes sense given their business model and platform focus.
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