Coursera may have found a way to monetize its massive open online courses (MOOCs).
Its Signature Track of courses, which links coursework to a student’s
identity for a fee, has had 4.7 million users and earned $4 million in cumulative
revenues since its launch in January 2013.
Now, the online educational platform is set to take it
one step further. Coursera launched Specializations as part of a strategy to
create certification that carries more weight than the credentials earned from
passing a single MOOC.
Coursera added 18 new courses to the track,
mostly for in-demand fields such as project management, cloud computing, and
data mining. Students have to complete a sequence of classes and pay $100-$300
depending on the number of courses.
