Verification log

This page exists because of a limitation we state everywhere else on the site: we have not taken these courses. Our reviews are built from providers' published syllabuses, pricing and documentation. The honest answer to "then why should I believe your facts" is not a promise, it is a receipt — so here is what we read, when we read it, and what it said.

What this records, and what it does not

Every row is an observation. "Coursera's page returned 200, did not redirect, and published educationalLevel: Beginner" is a fact about a fetch on a date. Whether that means our own Intermediate rating for the same course is wrong is a separate, editorial question — and one we answer deliberately rather than automatically, because a credential that assumes Python you are expected to already have is not a beginner credential just because the marketing page says so. Three courses on this site carry a level that disagrees with the provider's on purpose.

So nothing here is marked pass or fail. The checker reports; a human decides. A script that rewrote our prices from a scraped page unattended would be a worse failure than the drift it was built to catch.

Checked against the provider's own page

All 22 programmes whose provider publishes machine-readable course data, with the date each was last fetched and what its page said on that date.

Durations are reproduced in the ISO 8601 form the provider publishes, because the two forms are not the same kind of fact. PT7H7M6S is a length — seven hours and seven minutes. P3M is a pace: Coursera means "three months at the weekly effort we suggest", which is not a number of hours and cannot be compared with one. Where we publish an hour figure for a programme whose provider states only months, it is that stated pace multiplied out, and the entry in our catalogue records the arithmetic.

Eight of the rows above are proctored vendor exams — AWS, Databricks, Google Cloud, Microsoft, NVIDIA. Their pages publish no schema.org course data, so the check confirms the page is reachable and unmoved and can say nothing more. That is a limit of the method, recorded rather than hidden.

Checked by hand, and why they have to be

The 38 entries no automated check can reach, the reason in each case, and when a human last verified them.

Two providers, two different walls. DataCamp publishes no schema.org data on its course pages at all — confirmed against both the rendered DOM and the raw page source — so there is nothing for a parser to read. Udemy returns a Cloudflare challenge to any scripted request, and discontinued its affiliate API on 1 January 2025. Both are therefore verified by a person, in a browser, with the date recorded. We would rather say that plainly than publish a log that quietly covers one provider and lets you assume it covers three.

Machine-readable

The same record is published as /verification-log/verification.json under a CC BY 4.0 licence. Researchers and AI assistants are welcome to cite it with a link back to this page. The check runs weekly; the dates in it are the dates the pages were actually read.