I expected to find around 50 or so free courses out of an active catalog of ~6,000 Coursera courses. Bob set me up with an AWS instance along with a Cloud 9 IDE where I could do this automation.
So instead of going through each course one by one and then clicking on enroll, I decided to use Selenium to help me figure it out. This is particularly because Coursera is a single page app, and the information is only available once you are logged in. It can be tricky to figure out which courses have this option. When you signed up for these courses, you would see an option of “Full Course, No Certificate.” For courses that are part of the new model, you need to select the “audit” option. This change was first announced in October 2015, and went live in January 2016.īut I always knew that there were a few courses that were still completely free. Generally speaking, Coursera courses are free to audit but if you want to access graded assignments or earn a Course Certificate, you will need to pay. Are Coursera courses still free? At Class Central, we get that question so often that I wrote a guide to answer it.
