Coursera, the leading online learning platform, on Oct 3 announced Coursera for Campus — a new offering designed to help universities around the world respond to the unprecedented challenges posed by the Fourth Industrial Revolution and help them take a digital leap.
Now any university — even those outside of Coursera’s partner ecosystem — can use content on Coursera to deliver job-relevant, multi-disciplinary online learning to its learners. Universities will have 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 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.
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. 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.
“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,” said Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera. “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.”
It may be noted that according to some estimates, as much as 52% of jobs in India would be impacted by automation and this impact will be severe in the low skilled job segment. It is not secret that many graduates are not job ready and as such the skills gap is huge, so is the requirement of upskilling and reskilling. As such colleges and universities will have to compliment curricula and deploy resources to tide over this crisis.
Coursera’s 2019 Global Skills Index found that two-thirds of the world’s population is falling behind in critical skills. Higher education globally is gearing up to address this crisis, but many universities are constrained by the capacity of their on-campus programs and the challenge of recruiting expert faculty required to launch new programs.
“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,” said Matthew Rascoff, Associate Vice Provost for Digital Education and Innovation at Duke University.
About 10 universities in India have either partnered with Coursera or in talks for the new offering of Coursera for Campus. India is second largest market for Coursera after USA and there is an India office to service its offers.
