Info on coursera?

[Insert Name]

Regarding the cost of these classes, as of Jan - Mar 2021 when both myself and my wife were taking classes on Coursera, Coursera provides financial assistance on most (all?) classes on their catalog.  Choose to apply for financial aid and fill out a little application consisting mostly of why you'd like financial aid and how this will help you out, and Coursera seems to automatically approve your application - two weeks later.  If you plan accordingly, it seems like you can get all of your classes on Coursera for free, and I've used this to get my IT Support Professional Certification for free myself.  There are a couple things to note here, however. First, if you initiate a free trial of a class, it cancels your financial aid application, making this an either/or kind of situation.  Second, you have to apply for each individual course independently, so applying for the first class in the IT Support Professional certification isn't enough, it only gets you the one course - you have to apply for classes two, three, four, and five as well.  Note that you can have up to 11 or 12 "current" or applied-for classes, so you can apply for financial aid to a batch of classes rather than having to wait two weeks between each one.  I can also tell you that they don't hold it against you if you copy and paste your application answers between every class.
Note that the financial aid process isn't unique to the Google classes which are the primary focus here.  This seems to be doable with almost any class on Coursera - University of Michigan's Python for Everyone classes, University of Colorado's Agile Leadership classes, and others have been confirmed to work the same way.  In each case, Coursera seems to automatically approve financial aid applications after making you wait for two weeks.  

As for their use in a degree - the Google IT Support Pro certificate wasn't worth it to me - I would've been much better off grabbing a basic "Introduction to IT" class somewhere instead, in terms of time spent. That said, if you see a class on Coursera and you're like "that's neat, I want to check that out", just go apply to it and check it out. It costs you nothing, though they do ask you to commit to finishing the class.

The financial aid… is it through federal, like fill out a FAFSA and stuff like going to college, or just coursera helping you out?

[rachel83az]

The financial aid at Coursera is just Coursera helping you out.

[bjcheung77]

I remember taking Intro to Archeology as one of my courses when I was a freshman in college, it's an interesting course. For a young teen with interests in similar subjects, Coursera might be just an "intro" worth investigating, but because the courses may not be for credit, I would recommend taking them for the "fun in learning" not for the credit. You might want to get them started with AP, CLEP/MS and ACE courses then ladder your son up with Dual Enrollment when he's in Junior/Senior grades.