Coursera announces free access to students and teachers

Coursera, an online learning platform, announced free versions of Coursera for Campus and upgraded features to address the critical and long-term needs of higher education worldwide.

New features allow universities to deliver academic integrity for credit-bearing online learning, improve student employability, and author private courses. Today’s announcement builds on the momentum of the Campus Response Initiative, which was launched in March to give students and faculty free access to Coursera for Campus during pandemic-related closures. Currently, more than 3,700 institutions use Coursera for Campus to deliver online learning to over 2.4 million students.

“The pandemic has been a catalyst for universities to make online learning the core of their student experience,” said Jeff Maggioncalda, Coursera CEO. “We’ve grown from 30 universities using Coursera for Campus to over 3,700 in just seven months, and these upgrades will help them better deliver for-credit online learning and job-relevant skills for their students.”

The pandemic has placed enormous pressure on job opportunities, and students need to graduate with high-demand skills to gain employment. Using Coursera for Campus, universities can help students gain marketable skills with Professional Certificates from industry educators like Google, IBM, Facebook, Intuit, Salesforce, and Amazon. Launched in March, Guided Projects give students hands-on experience with tools like Python, SQL, HTML, Jupyter Notebooks, Java, R, Tensorflow, and Google Analytics. Students can learn these skills in under two hours and apply them in interviews and on-the-job.

With Coursera for Campus, universities in Pakistan served more than 68,000 students who have enrolled in over 588,000 courses from different countries in the recent lockdown.

Some of the leading institutions are University of Education Lahore, Riphah International University and Lahore College of Women University.

Coursera for Campus helps universities equally serve students including those with limited connectivity, bandwidth, and devices. Higher education institutions have used Coursera for Campus to enable continuous learning, offer supplemental content to their degree programs, and prepare students for jobs and internships.

70% of Coursera for Campus students used a mobile device for their learning during the pandemic. With mobile and offline learning, students can download courses, synchronize progress and quizzes, take notes with highlights, and calendar sync – all optimized for low data consumption. The platform also includes digital-first engagement tools to maximize learning effectiveness like bite-size videos, in-browser programming assignments, and guided projects for hands-on learning.

With online learning now core to the student experience, universities need an effective way to create and curate high-quality online curricula. In addition to 4,200 ready-made online courses from leading universities and companies, faculty now have access to the same powerful authoring platform as Coursera’s university content partners. They can efficiently build custom courses, hands-on projects, assessments, and even embed Zoom recordings with Live2Coursera. Strategies and resources for effective online teaching are also available on the Coursera Teaching Center.