Coursera Gets into Business Development

Coursera will continue to offer massive open online courses from prestigious colleges and universities from around the world. However, the ed-tech platform is also branching out to corporate learning and development.

The company recently launched Coursera for Business in response to large numbers of employees signing up for its classes in professional development. That should be a profitable venture since the 2015 Annual Training report found 70% of responding companies in the United States use learning management systems, virtual classrooms, webcasting, and other e-learning platforms to train their employees.

“We have 21 million registered users and are adding about a half-a-million registered users per month,” said Coursera CEO Rick Levin in an article for TechCrunch. “When we looked at the email addresses of our learners, we would see thousands signing up from one corporate email domain, tens of thousands in one case.”

Classes in the new program focus on tech skills for employees. Companies using Coursera for Business content can track the progress of their employees, who can earn certificates upon successful completion of a course.

CU System Is Monetizing MOOCs

The University of Colorado has generated about $110,000 since September from massive open online courses (MOOCs) because students are willing to pay for certificates of completion.

The CU system partnered with Coursera in 2013, producing dozens of courses for the MOOC provider, including several multicourse units on a single topic that have been particularly successful at earning revenue.

“A specialization is a cluster of courses that ends with a capstone project, and what Coursera has found—and we’ve found this, too—is that these specializations, these clusters of courses are really marketable and really valuable to people in the marketplace,” Deborah Keyek-Franssen, associate vice president for digital education and engagement for the CU system, said in an article for eCampus News.

The courses have been rated so highly that the business faculty on the Denver campus voted to accept a Coursera specialization certificate in data warehousing as a transfer credit that admitted students can apply toward the 30-credit master’s degree in information systems.

“That lowers the cost of attendance for students,” Keyek-Franssen said. “The business school understands that this is a way to recruit students into the program and they have full faith in the quality of the specialization because it’s been taught and is being built by their own faculty.”

The Boulder campus doesn’t accept certificates as transfer credits yet, but is looking into the possibility. Provost Russ Moore told eCampus News he needed “strong evidence” that students earning online certificates were getting the same level of instruction as those on campus, but does see the partnership with Coursera as a way to introduce people to the institution.

“In a way, it’s a different way of marketing what CU-Boulder has to offer on a broader scale,” he said. “[Professor] William Kuskin’s comic-book course, the first go-around, had 40,000 people sign up, so that’s a great way to get the word out.”

Critics Troubled by New MOOC Fees

The mission of massive open online course (MOOC) platform Coursera is to “provide universal access to the world’s best education,” according to its website. Critics are starting to wonder if that mission still holds after Coursera announced it would begin charging fees for a group of courses it calls Specializations.

Coursera offered learners the option of taking a course for free or paying $49 for an identity-verified course certificate upon completion. They could also choose the free version first and add the pay option during the run of the class. Learners taking a Specialization course are still able to choose to view course materials and view-only access to graded assignments for free, but must pay an up-front charge to start or prepay for the entire program for credit.

Last year, Rick Levin, CEO of Coursera, said Specializations would help the company build a sustainable business model. Critics see the shift as the unfortunate but inevitable outcome of a firm satisfying its investors.

“It is dismaying to see the so-called Silicon Valley ‘hypesters’ and geniuses failing to deliver on promised change,” George Siemens of the Learning Innovation and Networked Knowledge Research Lab, University of Texas at Arlington, said in a blog post for Inside Higher Ed. “The deep pool of visionary and re-architected future ended up being about as thick as a dollar bill.”

Matching Online Courses to Real Skills

Some critics have blasted colleges and universities for failing to ensure students are taking subjects that prepare them adequately for jobs after graduation. Coursera has kicked off a new program intended to align college coursework with the skills needed by major companies around the world.

Dubbed the Global Skills Initiative, the program pairs Microsoft, Cisco, UBS, Qualcomm, BNY Mellon, and Splunk with one of the 120 schools that provide online courses through Coursera. Together they will develop online course content specifically designed for each corporate partner’s field of specialty.

“The Global Skills Initiative brings together the knowledge of industry leaders and the world-class teaching and academic research of top universities to create highly applicable curricular material,” said Coursera CEO Rick Levin in a press release. Some of the partner companies may also use the collaborations to create internal training programs for existing staff.

The schools and companies will identify specific skill sets, especially those in high demand. The university creates the course, with funding from the corporation, which also furnishes industry expertise in the form of case studies, applied projects, and guest lectures. For example, Qualcomm is working with the University of California, San Diego, on course content related to the “Internet of things,” a concept focused on building computerized connectivity into ordinary objects such as household appliances.

Coursera Offers Special MOOCs

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.

Coursera Is Quick to Fix Possible Breach

While preparing to teach Stanford Law’s first Coursera class, the instructor stumbled across a potential breach that could have knocked Apple’s issues with a hack of iCloud security and compromising photos of entertainers out of the headlines. Jonathan Mayer, a computer scientist and lawyer, while setting up his massive open online course, was able to gain access to nine million Coursera names and email addresses.

In a blog post, Mayer wrote that: 

• Any teacher can dump the entire user database, including over nine million names and email addresses.
• Once logged into your Coursera account, any website that you visit can list your course enrollments.
• Coursera’s privacy-protecting user IDs don’t protect much. 

Mayer alerted Coursera, which addressed the issues immediately and sent an apology to its users. Once the patches were completed, Mayer found plenty of improvements, but problems still exist.

“The bad news is that anyone with teacher access can still look up any individual student’s contact information, so long as he or she either knows the student’s internal ID (it’s embedded in many pages) or can guess a distinctive part of the student’s email address (maybe try first initial last name?),” he said. “That’s a questionable security model, and it’s potentially inconsistent with Coursera’s privacy policy.”

Coursera Launches iPad App

Massive open online course provider Coursera has followed up its December release of an iPhone app with one for the iPad.

The new app is loaded with more than 600 courses, allowing users to download content for offline viewing. It also provides videos and reviews of written study material, along with educational quizzes.

Coursera, which has started work on an Android app it plans to launch later this spring, has been slow to develop mobile apps, but the new release appears to be worth the wait. VentureBeat reported the Coursera iPhone app earned a 4.5-star rating on the App Store.

Coursera Launches Mobile App

Coursera, the massive open online course (MOOC) provider, introduced an iPhone app that will bring its free courses to mobile iOS 7 devices. The app puts Coursera ahead of its competition in the effort to reach students on their smartphones or those in emerging nations, according to a report in VentureBeat.

The app provides all the features of the Coursera website. Students can use their iPhone or iPad to browse and enroll in courses, watch video lectures, or take quizzes over cellular connections or by downloading them to the device from the app.

The app is free in Apple App Store, but the device must run iOS 7.0 or later and students have to sign up for a Coursera account to access the material.

“The app doesn’t differ all that much from the web experiences that you may be used to,” noted tech writer Christina Farr. “However, much of the content is still under development, which is frustrating. Many of the courses are listed on the app as ‘coming soon.’”

Humanities Attracting the MOOC Crowd

It’s probably no surprise that computer science is the most popular subject offered by massive open online course provider Coursera with nearly 9.5 million people enrolled. Humanities, as a distant second, may come as more of a stunner.

Nearly four million people have taken humanities courses, according to information from the company. The numbers may be inflated somewhat because of the highly popular “Walking Dead” course, but they are still ahead of business and management (3.5 million), economics and finance (3.3 million) and information, tech, and design (2.4 million).

The fact that humanities are so popular as MOOCs and yet were basically ignored during a panel discussion featuring Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, last June caught the attention and ire of attendee, blogger, and UBC associate professor Jon Beasley-Murray. He wrote that the model for online learning is dominated by science and points a finger at the people responsible.

“The arts and humanities should have a vital role, critical and self-reflexive, that would complicate current discussion of technology in the classroom, and more broadly enhance our understanding of the university’s main challenges and possibilities in a global, wired world,” Beasley-Murray wrote. “But what we get instead is knee-jerk enthusiasm and self-defeating short-termism. This is not the fault of the sciences themselves—they should clearly and obviously be part of the conversation, too. It is, rather, the fault of an administration and senior management that has for some reason lost faith in its own mission and its own values, and in the people that it employs to think about and even question that mission and those values.”

Solving the MOOC Catch-22

Catch-22, a term made famous in the Joseph Heller novel of the same name, has entered the lexicon as a “no-win” situation. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) may have reached that point.

Students take MOOCs because they are free or at a very low cost, but want to receive credit for the work. Accreditation would raise the cost, which would, at the very least, make taking the course less attractive for many students. However, Coursera may have found of solution with its Signature Track program.

The educational technology firm recently reached $1 million in revenue from Signature Track courses, which offer verification certificates for a fee. Universities have struggled to find inexpensive ways to offer credit, but the Coursera example shows students are willing to pay fees for courses that are billed as free educational content if college credit is available as well.

“If a university were to offer a MOOC course, certificate, or degree at a modest rate, I believe that students would sign up,” Ray Schroeder, associate vice chancellor for online learning at the University of Illinois at Springfield, told eCampus News. “Charging 10% or less of normal tuition for a MOOC-delivered program is likely to be very popular. Charging full tuition for a MOOC is far less likely to garner much support.”

The other challenge currently facing MOOCs is building awareness. There are still plenty of educators who are not sold on the courses, and questions remain about how employers will view MOOC certificates compared to a traditional college degree.

“A lot of people right now are complaining about accreditation and so on for being such a barrier, which it is, but the history of disruption shows that when barriers collapse, it happens by going around them in different ways, not always going through,” said Michael Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. “I wonder if we’re seeing the beginnings of that here.”

MOOC Deal Makes Low-Cost Content Available

Lost in the hoopla over massive open online courses (MOOCs) as a cost-saving alternative for higher education is the expense of course materials. Coursera and Chegg have partnered on a pilot program that will make e-textbooks available for no cost and still provide each company with the opportunity to create a revenue stream.

Students will be able to get e-textbooks, or at least required chapters, through Chegg for selected Coursera courses for free. Students won’t be able to copy or print the text and it will only be available for the length of the course.

“Many instructors have been feeling a little hampered by how they must make their courses so self-contained,” Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller told The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Even $40 for a textbook is way out of reach for some students, so instructors have had to teach in ways they are not used to. They are unable to rely on any readings outside the public domain.”

According to reports, content will be made available on the Chegg e-reader that has been embedded into the Coursera platform, making it easier for students to find the required materials. Publishers participating in the program are Cengage Learning, Macmillan Higher Education, Oxford University Press, Sage, and Wiley & Sons.

Coursera and Chegg hope to monetize the partnership by selling the textbook or an abbreviated Coursera version to students. The companies would receive a percentage of the money from the sale, similar to how both earn commissions on books sold through Amazon.

The publishers will profit from sales of the content, as well as from data collected from the e-reader versions.

“Because the free versions of the books will be read through an e-reader, we’ll also get information about usage,” said Stuart Johnson, executive editor at John Wiley & Sons. “How students use the electronic text, how they use the materials, will be tracked through software.”

Coursera Begins to Make Money

The idea behind massive open online courses (MOOCs) is that the courses are free to anyone interested in signing up. That has led to concerns about how companies offering MOOCs could give away their services for free and remain afloat financially.

Now, Coursera reports that it brought in $220,000 during the first quarter of 2013. The company has 3.2 million registered users, up nearly 700,000 since mid-February.

Part of that revenue came from an Amazon.com affiliate program that pays when students purchase books suggested by the instructor.

The other part of the money came from Signature Track, a program that allows students to receive verified completion certification for a nominal fee. By using Signature Track, students pay a fee ranging from $30 to $100, are tracked by their “unique typing pattern” to ensure they are doing the work, and receive end-of-course recognition from the university offering the class through the platform.

Some of the money collected from the fees will be shared with the universities, according to reports. Coursera is also trying to create ways to raise money through proctored exams and matching students with employers, plus is set to launch an app platform which will allow universities to add instruction tools to enhance their MOOCs.

MOOC Provider Starts Career Services

Coursera reaches more than two million students and is partnering with 33 universities around the world through its offerings of massive open online courses (MOOCs). Now, it’s getting into the job-placement service, matching students with employers through its Coursera Career Services.

The program is a database where employers can find potential job candidates from top Coursera students. Students must opt into the service and employers must agree to keep the information confidential, but Coursera has already placed some students in at least one software firm to work on a pilot program.

The new service has potential to create revenue for the online educational platform. The Coursera contract with the University of Virginia even lists “employee recruiting” as a possible moneymaking  plan, with a percentage of the revenue going to the university.