The problem with Coursera is the project's assessment relies on peer-to-peer evaluation. This means, people with the same or even less knowledge than you are scoring your work. I started the Cal-arts UX course and got very disappointed due to this process.

For online certifications, I strongly suggest Udacity or Iteraction Design Foundation as alternatives. The first is more expensive, but the evaluation is done by UX experts who really provide usefull insights and corrections. IDF is approved by Norman Nielsen group and has lots of local groups making it easy to network.

If someone doesn't mind about having a certification but only learning, YouTube, Medium articles and other platforms do the job.

Saying this, congratulations for your article, it's very well written and is a complete guide about UX education.