Missing records and certificates for prior completed courses.
I've noticed some other posts about this, too, but I thought I'd investigate myself. Most of my time taking courses on Coursera dates back to 2012 through 2014ish while I was getting started in my Web Dev career. I attempted to change careers unsuccessfully in January of this year which eventually led to my unemployment in May. For a number of reasons the tech job market is rough right now, and I've been looking at ways to strengthen my resume. I figured I would add the Coursera certs and what not to help offset the fact that I don't have a CS degree.
TL;DR: Coursera changed platforms in 2015 and data prior is "not available".
Here was my chat with the support agent:
>Hi Ryan!
>Thank you for contacting Coursera Support Team! I'm Carmine and I'm glad to assist you today.
Thanks. I'm trying to understand where all the course records from prior years went. I've taken at least 7 or so courses on here over the years and I'm only seeing things later that 2021 in my account
>I see, thank you for letting us know about this Ryan. May I ask if you need your certificates from the past courses you've taken before?
At minimum yes, I'd like the PDFs, but I'd prefer them to be in the account with the others
>Thanks for confirming! Please give me a moment to check your account first. Thank you!
>Hi Ryan, are you still there?
Yes
>Thank you for waiting. To kindly inform you, all of our Courses were supported by our previous platform. Most of these have been migrated to our new platform, and Coursera began developing a new technology platform in 2014 that allows courses to be offered more frequently and with a more flexible time schedule. Since upkeeping two platforms requires significant resources, we chose to end access to the old platform on June 30, 2016. This is the reason why you cannot see the courses anymore on your list of completed courses.
>Since we migrated our platform back in 2015 to a new platform, we appreciate your understanding that some of the courses might not be offered now, or there are no active sessions running for these; we are not able to release the Certificate from our end. You may browse our new catalog for more courses of your interest or on the same subject.
But I paid for these things
>I understand Ryan, and I really wish I could help, however, I apologize as we are not able to retrieve back the older courses.
Not even the PDF assets?
>Yes, that is correct.
>We sincerely apologize for this, and we appreciate your understanding.
>Are you still there? I'm here if you need help!
I wouldn't say I understand. It should have been very easy for your team to have saved all the PDF assets for your users. And I am not convinced this didn't happen. I'm more convinced that you don't want to pay for the resources to provide the level of service required to retrieve that content for us.
I appreciate your having looked into it, but I'm quite disappointed.
So yea, I guess always save your PDFs, but it's really the verified link that seemingly matters. Especially in this AI slop age. Oh well.
UPDATE: They clearly have access to at least some of the missing data and might restore some of it to your account. In my case, they restored "Computer Science 101" from June 2012 and "An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python (Part 1)" from June 2014. The former is basically an empty shell, but the later has both the Certificate and the share link. This more or less confirms my assumption that they have the data but requires some manual support work on their end.