Growing up, I had the impression that skills are like a switch: it’s either on or off. I can either sing or I can’t. I can either play football or I can’t. I can either do math or I can’t. (guess which of those things I actually can do?).

That is simply not true. Most skills are like a spectrum. Anything can be learned to a certain extent with a bit of grit, and bit of luck, and a lot of time and commitment. I, personally, can attest to that.

There are plenty of online resources that enabled self-learning, but my absolute favorite is, you might have guessed it, Coursera - the famous leearning platform. It offers a great deal of high quality courses on just about any topic. It also gives out certificates upon course completion, which is extremely useful for enhancing your profile (just check my LinkedIn page for an example).

The one barrier that usually discourages people from trying Coursera, it turns out, is the cost, which looks something like this:

• $49/ month for a course/ a specialization, for as many months as it takes you to complete that course.
• $59/ month ($399/ year) for Coursera Plus, which includes access to all courses.

I’d say that in exchange for good education, the price is not that high. But if you’re a struggling university students, or you want to take a whole lot of courses - like, idk, more than 50 courses for example, then maybe you need some… solutions.

Let me show you.

7-day free trial

This one is pretty simple. On every course home page, you’ll see a big blue “Enroll for free” button, which will triggers a 7-day trial. Just click the button, enters your credit card number or sign in Paypal and you can get started immediately. (I prefer Paypal because that way I won’t ever be accidentally charged by the end of the trial)

Here’s the beautiful thing about free trial:

• this trial will enables full access to an entire specialization (which is a collection of multiple course)
• if you complete a course (or many) during this trial, you still get a permanent certificate.

I completed a few specializations, for example Data Engineering Foundations (5 courses), using this method. (more on how I learnt so fast later).

Financial Aid

The other way to study free of charge on Coursera is to apply for financial aid. You can see a the button “Financial aid available” just alongside the blue Enroll button (see image above).

Click on it and you will be asked to enter a few details and answer two questions (minimum of 150 words for each answer).

• Why are you applying for financial aid?
  • My tips: Explain your financial situations and why you cannot afford a course. You can talk about your own employment status and income, (and maybe add that of your entire family too). Coursera seems to prefer giving financial aid to students in need.
• How will taking this course help you achieve your career goals?
  • My tips: Outline your career aspirations (e.g: I want to be [a job position]), and try to link that to the content of the course. Be sure to show that you know what the course is about (read the course summary and list out what it teaches in your answer).

Here a some of the things you should know about financial aid:

• You can apply for financial aid as many times as you want. (But only 10 concurrent applications is allowed).
• You need to apply separately for each course (if a specialization has 5 courses, you have to apply 5 times).
• Each application takes 15-16 days to process, so my strategy is often to apply for a few at a time to minimize waiting.
• After financial aid is granted, you have 6 months to complete the course, which is plenty of time. After that, you must re-apply to get access.
• You can re-use the same answer multiple times (I have used the same answers for 50+ applications since 2020 and it still works).

Appendix: Speed up

I have seen some people scared off by the estimate of completion time shown on the course home page.

I can assure you: it’s not as scary as it looks. First of all, Coursera severely overestimates the completion time of the course’s modules (for example, some quizzes take minutes to complete but is estimated at 1 hour). And second of all, you can actually speed up the learning process. Here are some of my personal tips

Watch videos at 2x speed

If you can watch videos at any speed faster than 1x, then you time spent on video materials (which accounts for most of the course) will be cut by 20-50%.

It may not be as hard as it sounds, especially with subtitle turned on, but I understand that this method may not be for everyone.

Skip around.

Some of the course content are entirely optional (for example: optional readings, quizzes, exercises,…) so if you feel like these sections aren’t helpful, feel free to skip them. Also, if you encounter any parts that you might have had prior knowledge, you can skip them as well. Coursera don’t mind and it will give your certificates, as long as you …

Focus on graded assignments

If you’re after the certificates, then graded assignments are the only thing you need to care about. You can watch 0 videos, but as long as you complete the graded assignments, then the certificate is yours. However, this only works if you are already familiar with the course’s content and only want to get it done so you get the certificate.

I hope you’ve found this useful. If you need a sample of the financial aid answers, feel free to reach out to me.