MOOC's credentials are of little help for college admission
Prospective students in America are touting massive open online course enrolment and completion on college applications, often in the hope of differentiating themselves from their competitors. The New York Times reports that college admissions officers are viewing these classes on applications as similar to extracurriculars that they do not necessarily need to verify, because they are interesting but not a game changer for a student’s application. Some admissions officers say there is little confidence in each MOOC’s content or quality based on a course title, leaving their impact on an applicant’s chances minimal for now.
“We’ve noticed in the past few years, more and more students who apply to us mention they’ve taken online courses of various kinds,” said Marlyn McGrath, director of admissions for Harvard College. Lest anyone think, however, that MOOCs are a magical key to getting into Harvard, she added:

“It falls into the category of very interesting things we’d like to know about you.”

The courses are designed by colleges and universities around the world and distributed online, by organizations like edX and Coursera, where they can be taken free. No application is required, so anybody can sign up for “The Science of Happiness,” from the University of California at Berkeley, for example, or “American Government” from Harvardx, which is affiliated with Harvard University. More recently, MOOCs have also been employed to supplement high school Advanced Placement classes, including a project called Davidson Next.

Katherine Cohen, founder of an admissions counseling company in New York City called IvyWise, said the number of her clients who had taken MOOCs had been steadily increasing in recent years. Dr. Cohen says they give applicants the chance to take classes not offered at their own schools, like advanced math or a business course, and to “appear more scholarly” in their areas of interest.

These classes also offer high school students the chance to show that they did not just spend the summer playing Xbox and napping.

Last summer, just before his senior year, Musa Jamshed, an accomplished chess player who had spent several summers teaching at a chess camp in Manhattan, decided to augment chess with a couple of MOOCs.

“I didn’t really know exactly how valid or how common it was to put this kind of thing on a college application, but I had some open space in my summer,” Mr. Jamshed, 18, said. “I didn’t want it to seem like I wasn’t doing anything.”