Coursera vs. SANS Security Awareness Training

The Coursera platform can be a useful part of your overall learning content portfolio if utilized correctly. It's fantastic for asynchronous courses that don't necessarily need a dedicated faculty member (though I'd highly recommend at least having some discussion moderators/student workers) and for offering MOOCs. The ability for the learners to contribute translations really makes it ideal for the international learning community - I am always amazed to see a course we launched with 2-3 languages to quickly have 10-12 more added. This feature really helps expand the audience reach and Coursera has such a large following already that it can grow seemingly overnight.

Incentivized

SANS Security Awareness Training program would be well suited for a large organization that needs to develop multiple training programs with different courses based on the roles of the end users. It seemed a bit difficult at times to achieve simple setup processes because of the configurations tailored to larger, more complex organizations.

Incentivized

• Interaction: the student learns by doing. For programming courses, this means programming!
• Assessments: the courses I'd taken ask students to grade each others work with a rubric. This is hugely effective and permits tests and quizzes to be other than multiple choice.
• Creativity and enthusiasm of the instructors. Some of the approaches demonstrated real out-of-the-box thinking by the instructors. For example, the Rice Python course was a self-contained website requiring no installation of IDE on one's computer, and the final project was a working version of Asteroids.
• Low cost of entry: most of the course I enrolled in were free, with an optional fee for certifications. This really gives people the freedom to explore learning. It's almost like a Public Library of Learning.
• Coursera forces a weekly discipline on the user with lectures and assignments and this really motivates one to put in the effort.

Incentivized

• Variety of cyber threat videos and presentations
• Web based and mobile access to the platform
• Easy to manage administrator access to configure the training sessions

Incentivized

• Some of the courses (very few) have some old information (more than 2 years), and in some areas like technology the information has to be very new and updated.
• Some professors or people doing videos are not good in front of the camera, they should train their people a little bit more for those things.

Incentivized

• Mass import of users was a bit confusing
• User interface was sometimes not intuitive
• Ability to upload custom content was difficult to use

Incentivized

Constantly renewing already. One of my favourite MOOC platforms.

Incentivized

User-friendly and developer-friendly Web UI.

Incentivized

I’ve used it a couple of times and... that did great. They take their time, but in the end they solve your issues.

Incentivized

Coursera is familiar, intuitive, compatible and easy to use and implement.

Incentivized

I think Coursera has the best overall interface. I think you will find that different platforms go in different directions, and have different specialities. For the most part the differences are more in the types of courses they offer than one being particularly better than the other, so it comes down to content for me.

Incentivized

We actually are currently migrating to Proofpoint Security Awareness Training because of its integration with the Proofpoint email filter. This will allow us to target specific users who are clicking on bad emails with specific training material. We have used KnowBe4 in the past as well, but it was rather costly compared to SANS Security Awareness Training and Proofpoint. SANS Security Awareness Training seems to be the least easy-to-use interface from an administrative perspective compared to the other two.

Incentivized

• The greatest benefit of Coursera is access to quality courses on various subjects that you can either browse or dive in deeply. Customizable, flexible and accessible.
• Helps our department to recommend trainees courses on this website and gain important knowledge. Also, the courses are provided by big-name universities which helps students in their careers
• Developing and exploring professional skills.

Incentivized

• Positive impact knowing we are educating our staff from phishing and potential cyber criminals
• Considering the potential for bad actors infiltrating our network, this is a small expense
• Pricing based on actual end users, worth the investment

Incentivized