Maciej Olpinski
UPDATE: LinkedIn has just started recognising Coursera certifications and provided an elegant way to add them to your profile. The workaround below can still work but it is not as relevant anymore.
LinkedIn doesn't provide a native way to showcase your MOOC achievements.
However, using a few easy hacks you can make sure your online education is properly displayed on your profile page in Education & Courses sections. This method will also allow you to feature projects you've created during an online course.
The main idea is to add a MOOC platform as a "School" in the Education section and then add individual MOOCs by linking them with the newly added school.
Note: Some people may argue that MOOCs platforms should not be confused with traditional schools in your resume. That might be true but the method outlined below provides maximum visibility of your online education achievements on the LinkedIn page and in my view is justified until LinkedIn provides a native feature to display MOOC awards. It's also a necessary step to further popularize MOOCs and familiarize HR departments with these new forms of education. The HR & recruitment people browse LinkedIn a lot and the more non-traditional education they see, the faster they'll start to recognize its growing importance & value. As always, whenever in doubt, use your own judgement.
STEP 1. In "Education" section, add your MOOC platform as a school
Make sure to provide a relevant description of the MOOC platform and a URL to its website. This way there won't be any doubt regarding to the type of education you feature on your profile.
STEP 2. In "Courses" section, add your individual courses
In the "Course Name" field you can provide as much information as necessary. You can use the following format:
[
Course Name] | [University providing the Course] | [URL to an online certificate (if public)]
If your MOOC platform does not provide public URLs to certificates you can upload a PDF to Dropbox and provide a public link here.
Ideally, LinkedIn should provide more space and separate form fields for all this data. Until then, we have to squeeze it into the Course Name field. Sorry
(Optional) STEP 3. In "Projects" section, Add your course Projects
If during your course you created any publicly visible projects you can also feature them on your profile. In my view, one of the greatest features of MOOCs is their transparency & public visibility of the digital artefacts students create as part of their coursework.
Go to the Projects section, provide your project information and link it to the MOOC platform. Again it's very important to take advantage of the "Description" field to save readers any confusion regarding the origin of your project.
You're done!
To see how the final outcome looks like, you can check my LinkedIn profile where I've included two courses from Stanford's Venture Lab (scroll down to the Education / Courses / Projects section).
http://pl.linkedin.com/in/maciej...
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