Hi! This is my experience getting financial aid for a course at Coursera. I recently took the Customer Engagement Specialist Professional Certificate Course offered by IBM. If you are interested, you can see here. The course is quite expensive at $ 99 USD or around IDR 1.4 million for someone who lives in a developing country or for a student.
What is Coursera?
Before we dive deeper, maybe you don’t know about Coursera yet. According to Wikipedia, Coursera is a worldwide online learning platform founded in 2012 by Stanford University computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller that offers a massive open online course (MOOC), specialties, degrees, professional courses and mastertracks.
Coursera collaborates with universities and other organizations to offer online courses, certifications and degrees in a wide variety of subjects. The fields offered are engineering, data science, machine learning, mathematics, business, computer science, digital marketing, humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences, and others. So the bottom line is that courses are offered online and there is a large selection of courses and getting a certificate after completing the course. Read review about Coursera by Edvicer here.
How much does a course on Coursera cost?
There are some courses on the Coursera that are free, some are paid. For free courses, you can immediately access all the features of the course without paying for a certificate. But for paid courses, you have to pay for them or apply for financial aid if you can’t afford them. When you purchase a Certificate, you will have access to all course material, including the assignments that are graded.
Upon completion of the course, an electronic Certificate will be added to the Achievements page. You can print a certificate or add it to your LinkedIn profile. If you just want to read and view course content, then you don’t have to pay for it
Apply for financial aid on Coursera
Coursera offers financial assistance to underprivileged students like me. Students with Financial Aid will be able to access all course content and complete all the work required to earn a Course Certificate. Financial Aid and Scholarships apply only to courses for which the application was approved.
Most of the courses offer Financial Aid or Scholarships, but these may not be available for certain courses. and also we can only apply for financial aid for one course only. then can apply again if interested or want to complete the specialization program.
How to apply for financial aid
To apply you must complete an application which includes information about your educational background, career goals, and your financial situation. and Committed to complying with the Honor Code and our Code of Conduct.
Follow these easy steps:
- Choose the course you want to take. In this case the IBM Customer Engagement Specialist Professional Certificate. Next to the enroll button is the word “Financial Aid Available”. and choose
- Click Continue to the application.
- Check and copy the statement sentence. tick all that you will commit to completing the course to the end, and copy that sentence into that column
- Fill out the form according to real conditions. For this answer, I will suggest a few points to include in the answer when claiming financial aid.
Why are you applying for Financial Aid?
- Tell them about your background.
- Your parents’ individual income and compare it to the country’s average income.
- Your current educational scenario and future references.
- Your interest in that topic.
- Future planning for pursuing this course.
How will taking this course help you achieve your career goals?
- Tell them about your future goals for taking this course.
- How will you be motivated to complete this course.
- Explain to them how you will contribute to the community and forum.
- Explain that you will follow the Code of Conduct and assist others in discussion sessions.
- Also tell them how you will benefit from this course.
For this part Would you consider using a low-interest loan to pay for your courses?, I choose No because I was not interested in applying for a loan when registering this course.
Application accepted
After sending the application, it will take about 15 days to wait, we will get an email response from Coursera. This email will be sent to the email address used to create the Coursera account. After your application is approved, you can immediately study on the Coursera website.
Good luck! thank you for reading my experience of getting financial aid Coursera. Hopefully useful 🙂
