I personally did not enjoy the threat of expulsion in my inbox this morning. As, like probably many other, but the code up on Github because, well this is just what I do with code.
I've signed up for this class because I was interested in learning something. Cheating would obviously not teach me anything, so why even take the class in the first place?
The Coursera certification currently holds no or little value. Maybe if they gain enough traction, someday, having many coursera certificates could have some value when applying for a job. This is not currently the case. I understand that they want to be in the position at some point in the future and that if they don't enforce these rules now, doing so later will be hard. Nevertheless, threatening to ban users in not a winning move for any startup.
A better solution would be to offer an alternative to Github, maybe even a partnership with Github. If they hosted their own git repository and used that as the submission system, they users could get source control, as well as a simple mean of distributing assignments.
> I personally did not enjoy the threat of expulsion in my inbox this morning. As, like probably many other, but the code up on Github because, well this is just what I do with code.
Then you're violating the conduct. They ask tons of times to not share your code, including on GH. So you should either use a private GH repo or host it elsewhere, privately.
Don't whine about not liking the "threat of expulsion" when it's perfectly clear that you shouldn't be doing that.
They shouldn't have to offer that, anyone who wants a private repo for free can use bitbucket, for instance.
The issue isn't that the school isn't within their rights to do this. It's that they're putting an unnecessary limitation on good students, forcing them to help fight the cheaters. There's nothing inherently wrong with putting up my answers to homework on GH. The onus should be on students to not cheat; it feels kind of scummy to force students who have no desire to cheat to take down their code in a sad attempt to fight cheaters.
I guess I'm a little bit curious as to why it is so important code like this ends up on your Github account? It is pretty simple, relatively useless outside of the course, and thousands of other people are writing very similar code - I'm not sure I see the value in hosting your solution on github.
Perhaps in a perfect world, you could publicly post all of your homework and whoever is administering the course would be able to detect someone using your code for their homework - that is incredibly difficult in the best of circumstances, and in this case, effectively impossible. Doing something about low-hanging fruit - publicly available answers to the questions - seems like a reasonable mitigation step.
Really? That sounds like something I would not expect to get away with in a number of situations. Like, for most of the stuff I've done as a student and as an employee I have considered stuff like that to be totally out of the question.
(And in this case, it doesn't even feel that much like "my" code. It's mostly written by them Coursera course people, with a few blanks filled out by me. I'm not sure how cool I think it is to upload other people's code to publicly available places without checking with them first.)
Did you read the terms of the course? Did you notice that they ask that solutions to assignments not be shared publicly? I think it's an even poorer move to blatantly violate Coursera's terms, and then claim that "that's what you do with code". You should seriously consider taking down your github repository.
I've signed up for this class because I was interested in learning something. Cheating would obviously not teach me anything, so why even take the class in the first place?
The Coursera certification currently holds no or little value. Maybe if they gain enough traction, someday, having many coursera certificates could have some value when applying for a job. This is not currently the case. I understand that they want to be in the position at some point in the future and that if they don't enforce these rules now, doing so later will be hard. Nevertheless, threatening to ban users in not a winning move for any startup.
A better solution would be to offer an alternative to Github, maybe even a partnership with Github. If they hosted their own git repository and used that as the submission system, they users could get source control, as well as a simple mean of distributing assignments.
This felt like a poor PR move from coursera.