World’s leading online learning platform Coursera has launched Coursera for Campus to help universities around the world respond to the unprecedented challenge posed by the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
With Coursera for Campus, any university – even those outside of Coursera’s partner ecosystem – can now offer job-relevant, multi-disciplinary online learning to its learners. Universities can access to more than 3,600 high-quality courses that they can use to integrate into their curricula, offer credit eligible and supplemental learning to their current students, and deliver lifelong learning to their alumni, faculty, and staff. Universities will also be able to use Coursera’s world-class tools to author content and assessments, Coursera Labs for hands-on projects, and Coursera’s learning analytics to improve and track learner outcomes.
Coursera’s 2019 Global Skills Index found that two-thirds of the world’s population is falling behind in critical skills. While higher education globally is gearing up to address this crisis, many universities are constrained by the capacity of their on-campus programs and the challenge of recruiting expert faculty required to launch new programs. Well, this realization makes Coursera to launch Coursera for Campus to help universities around the world take a digital leap.
Speaking on the newly launched Coursera for Campus, Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera, said,
“Hundreds of millions of job seekers will enter the workforce in the coming years, but higher education in many countries finds it difficult to deliver the skills students need in the age of AI and automation. Coursera for Campus gives universities the ability to quickly respond to the demands of a rapidly changing economy. With access to content from 200 of the world’s top universities and industry educators, higher education institutions can easily enhance their existing curricula with critical digital skills and author online courses to keep pace with what employers need.”
Coursera for Campus gives universities the ability to:
- Provide current students with job-relevant learning and credentials – Universities can integrate Coursera courses into their core curricula as credit-eligible, blended, and supplemental learning. With world-class content and trend data from Coursera’s large learner base, the platform will offer pre-configured course collections for learners by domain areas (e.g. engineering, business, data science, law, health, arts, design, etc.) Universities can directly offer these collections or swap out courses with new ones – either from the broader Coursera catalog or with courses they have authored themselves. Features such as single sign-on, API integration, gradebooks, and plagiarism detection will help universities seamlessly incorporate online learning into their on-campus programs.
- Enable faculty to author and scale online programs for free – With Coursera’s world-class authoring tools, university faculty can easily experiment and publish private lessons, courses, assessments, and hands-on projects available only to their students and alumni. Faculty will also have access to learning analytics via the Course Progress and Skills Index Dashboards to understand student behavior, skill mastery, and growth.
- Deliver lifelong learning to alumni, faculty, and staff – According to Deloitte, the half-life of a learned skill is now just five years. With Coursera for Campus, universities can increase alumni engagement by serving their learning needs throughout their career. Coursera for Campus enables faculty and staff to rapidly upskill and catch up on emerging areas. Universities can also use the platform to help incoming students be prepared on day one.
Coursera for Campus has been launched after extensive pilots in more than 20 top university campuses around the world. Initial pilot partners include Duke University, University of Illinois, and Manipal Academy of Higher Education, who have been using the offering to serve their on-campus students, faculty, and staff.
Commenting on how Coursera for Campus allows students to advance their skills, Matthew Rascoff, Associate Vice Provost for Digital Education and Innovation at Duke University, said,
“The market for skills is evolving, and education must evolve with it. To reduce skills gaps and spread opportunity widely, we need to be flexible and adaptive. Coursera for Campus complements our core curriculum, allowing thousands of Duke students to advance their skills for a digital world. We’re pleased to partner with Coursera to scale this proven approach to students worldwide.”
Emphasizing on the importance of lifelong learning experiences, Kevin Pitts, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, said,
“In today’s rapidly changing landscape, it’s important to create lifelong learning experiences for our students and staff to stay competitive in the workforce. Coursera for Campus has already proven to be a valuable resource for our on-campus populations, and we look forward to using the program to engage our students beyond degree programs.”
Ravi Panchanadan, MD & CEO at Manipal Global Education Services (MaGE), also commented saying,
“Recognizing the changing skills needed for the future of work, we wanted to create a multi-disciplinary learning ecosystem that allows students to pursue their passion and learn in-demand skills. The quality content available on Coursera for Campus has already helped more than 20,000 Manipal students. Manipal Education including Manipal Academy of Higher Education – an Institution of Eminence from India, has always been the first to champion new education models and we are excited to see how the program will benefit more universities across the globe.”
Founded in 2011 by Stanford Professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng with a vision to give anyone, anywhere access to the world’s best education, Coursera is today the world’s largest online learning platform for higher education. It has partnered with more than 200 of the world’s top universities and industry educators around the world enabling them to offer courses, specializations, certificates, and degrees. Coursera has now more than 44 million registered global learners. Through its enterprise platform Coursera for Business, Coursera is helping over 2,000 companies transform their talent. Coursera also partners with governments worldwide through its platform Coursera for Government, which equips government employees and citizens with in-demand skills to build a competitive workforce. The online learning platform is backed by investors including Kleiner Perkins, New Enterprise Associates, GSV Capital, Learn Capital, and SEEK Group.
Coursera for Campus enables a global education ecosystem where every university can collaborate to share knowledge and train the workforce of the future. It is now available to universities worldwide, with full functionality rolling out over the coming months. For detailed information, visit www.coursera.org/campus.
Coursera in India
While talking about the programs and impact of Coursera globally, it is worth mentioning here the presence and impact of the platform in India. According to the report provided by the company, Coursera has a big market in the country. It currently has 4.8 million registered learners with 100k+ learners being added per month in India. It has 50+ enterprise customers including Mindtree, Tata Communications, Axis Bank, Infosys, Airtel, and Manipal Group, to name a few. Coursera has two university partners – India School of Business (ISB) and IIM Calcutta. It offers 3 specializations, 17 courses from its India university partners (all belong to ISB). The platform also has 6 C4C partners in India which include Manipal University, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS), Shiv Nadar University (SNU), KL University, UPES, and Pearl Academy. As per the information, popular topics in India include Computer Science, Business and Data Science.
