Coursera will ultimately try and leverage their courses as a hiring mechanism. I'm participating in the course, and have taken a prior course as well. After sigining up you will receive an email from coursera asking your permission to share course results with employers.
If they can't use the course certificate as a signal mechanism then there will be no incentive for employers to partner with them
Markets are not efficient which is another way of saying that information asymmetry exists.Successful financiers would prefer to keep it that way. What would be a rational reason for divulging why you turned down a potential opportunity? You can't really formulate one.
Also, this doesn't have anything to do with VC's per se. It happens in Private Equity, Fixed Income, Credit, Public Equities ...
If they can't use the course certificate as a signal mechanism then there will be no incentive for employers to partner with them