Is it me or are free courses in Coursera disappearing?

Somewhere over the internet I found this Specialization composed of 4 courses:

www.coursera.org/specializations/gcp-sysops

And I can't seem to find the separated courses to enroll in them. And I'm not going to spend 250 trumps on it.

I also took a look around the website and there seemed to be way less courses than 2,5 years ago, when I took a couple of courses on it.

Look the courses up by name in the catalog. Here's the first one in the spesh you linked:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/gcp-fundamentals

As for the number of courses -- they've had a massive redesign, some universities were only experimenting with the format, some decided to not keep up with the new perpetual schedule, stuff happened, etc.

I have no idea which prices it shows you, they have regional pricing up the wazoo and even regional billing schemes (e.g. Belarus gets massively screwed). IF a monthly spesh subscription is available, know that you can really cut costs by enrolling for a free trial, downloading everything, unsubbing, completing the assignments at your leisure, then submitting everything at once. Oh, and Financial Aid is a thing that exists. I applied once and got it overnight.

I'm sorry dude, I don't really have an answer.

I just wanted to comment how it's such a brazilian thing to nickname a currency by the country's president. It's sort of new habit we picked up and I kind of love it, although I must say it was much more fun to call Reais "Dilmas" instead of "Temers". I also used to call the card where I got my government scholarship in the "Dilma card" too.

Other courses have it. For example, dsaa apparently has subscription now and also individual free audits (that I can't see because I already paid in full), bioinformatics lost the free option when it went sub but now seems to have it again, the spesh I work for (which has the best free portion I've ever seen but is Russian-only so far) has jacked up prices by 60% screwing over people who were planning to pay when their free week was over. Yours is only a month long (it has to do with the Google Cloud free trial, see the faq) so it won't get a sub option.

Finaid as I got it was free, no strings attached, no taxes, no payment info required. You have to complete the course in the allotted time (6 months) or else Daphne will frown in your general direction, take a deep sigh and contemplate the sad future of humanity. Some people reported getting whole speshes for free. Others reported getting a 2-week free period. Since each course in your spesh is only a week long, if you get any sort of bonus, you'll be effectively getting a whole free course.

Important: when requesting finaid, you should explain why you need access to paid tests and/or a cert in addition to the free content.

I see. Well, I'll try and see where it gets me.

In the end, asking for Financial Aid for the first course worked. I took it and it was interesting, even if it had a very marketing-like design.

And, of course, I can't ask for Financial Aid for the remaining courses and can't actually watch the courses for free either. A very clever "Fuck you" from them.

T_T

That's largely on Google. The course creator decides whether to provide free audit and/or financial aid options, and for the former, how much will be free. Google is particularly assholish, because in my year on Coursera this spesh is the first time I'm not seeing either option -- I'd always thought the finaid notice under the button was synonymous with "this course has a paid option".

(Then again, I'm not impartial because I am a success story -- four months of being rude to people in a course's official chat and I quit my job and started a data science business.)

Which is weird as hell. Google, who has all the money, can't offer a few free courses on tech that's theirs and in their interest that we learn how to use and use as much as we can.

On other news, I got rejected on another job interview. T_T

Coursera is sadly not what it used to be, but it is still it's a an excellent resource for learning new skills.
What I do nowadays is just free audit individual courses and do them at my own pace. Who gives a crap about those certificates anyway? What's important is actually learning something.

It allows 100%-ing courses now. Previously, people were stuck with the grades they got.

I graduated from what used to be at the time the country's 3rd best university and was stuck as a white collar day laborer for years and years. I earned my first cert on June 18, 2016. It hasn't even been a year and I have 39 of them (regional pricing + speedruns + 1 finaid request + 5 from beta testing), and a business (including an office and tech) basically gifted to me by a sufficiently impressed investor. I got extremely lucky to have been swearing in the general direction of a well-connected person in the right place at the right time, but it'd have meant fuck all if not for the certs. All three people involved (1) knew the difference between Coursera and scam sites advertizing on Cracked and BoingBoing, and (2) massively overestimated the difficulty of obtaining certs (after payment). The certs served as proof of competence / persistence / enthusiasm in lieu of actual work experience.

So I ended suckin' it up and paying for the remaining courses. Last week I took the second and struggled a bit with, what I was later told by the Google Cloud support staff, outdated materials (nothing huge, document told to install java 7, I actually needed Java 8, but it took me a few days and lots of different attempts to discover this).

Anyway, yesterday I got an email from Coursera explaining that they are ending the specialization I'm taking and have already payed for, and will be making available a new, seemingly different one, focused in helping people pass a certain Google Certified Professional - Cloud Architect exam.

I still don't know how the heck they will update me to the new specialization courses, and I suspect there will probably be more money involved, or if they'll allow me to finish both remaining courses on the old one I bought (I know that I can still enroll in the third one, but I'm not sure I'll be able to enroll in the last one).

To make matters worse, Coursera doesn't seem to like making a freakin' support email available for us to use.

Serves me right, I guess. T_T

It is a long time since I used coursera. Does it still make sense do enroll in courses without paying the fee? Or are essential materials unavailable without coughing up some money? I wonder, because when they started they said they wanted to bring education to the masses or something and now all I see is a green banner telling me how wonderful a monthly subscription would be.

What I do know is that some courses, including the ones I mentioned above, demand payment and have no financial aid option.

And, yes, their business model seems to have changed a bit.

Quick update: in the end they let me finish the old specialization course and granted me free access to the new one. Good.

I finished the old one last week, I was supposed to start the new one today, but I'm willing to take a break to focus on studying other stuff. So I didn't enroll in the current sessions.

I still haven't found a job. T_T