In 2016 Coursera launched Coursera for Business, which was designed to provide an enterprise learning platform for ‘workforce development at scale’.  It’s a platform that has proven popular with the business community as it allows organizations to mash courses and modules together into key developmental buckets for employees to pursue.

The approach had also proven surprisingly popular with the academic community whose courses were being offered, and this has resulted in the recent launch of Coursera for Campus, a new platform that allows universities to easily augment their own offerings with MOOC courses offered by rival universities.

“Instead of a company administering to employees, it’s universities administering it to students,” Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda told me recently. “While the genesis is similar however, the use case is very different.”

Adapting to a changing world

Much has been written about the skills gap within businesses, and the difficulty they are facing in obtaining the skills within their workforce to respond to a rapidly changing world.  The same is true for universities, as the changing demands of the labor market place intense demands on universities to respond in kind, and many report that they lack the skills among their faculty to provide the education the market demands.

“The rate at which new skills and disciplines are emerging, especially in technologies such as machine learning and AI, universities are saying that they simply don’t have the faculty to keep up,” Maggioncalda continues. “They want to maintain the relevance of their curriculum to students and employees, and a great way to do that is to utilize the huge catalog of content from Coursera partners around the world.”

There are around 3,600 courses currently available on the platform, and they are all available to universities who wish to enroll and integrate them into their own curricula.  At launch, around 20 had signed up, including HEC Paris, Yale, Imperial College London, Duke University and Johns Hopkins, with these early adopters combining credit-eligible and supplemental learning to their student body.

Lifelong learning

Obviously the program is in its infancy at the moment, so it’s not clear what kind of disruptive impact it may have on the sector.  A number of possibilities are clearly evident however.  For instance, while it’s noticeable that many of the initial users are blue chip universities, there is clear potential for less prestigious universities to bolster their curriculum with high quality tuition from some of the world’s leading academics.

It’s already common for prestigious universities to provide a curriculum to foreign institutions in return for a licensing fee. In 2016 there were over 700,000 students studying for a British university qualification overseas, and it’s easy to see Coursera on Campus extending this possibility, with world leading academics delivering the content as well as authoring it.

It’s also easy to see how the content can augment the overseas campuses of prestigious universities around the world. In 2018, British universities had nearly 40 campuses overseas, which collectively educated around 26,000 students.

There is also evident potential for universities to better engage with their alumni community.  The shelf live of skills is getting ever shorter, especially in fast moving disciplines such as computer programming.  It seems logical therefore for institutions to offer alumni regular ‘top up’ courses that allow former students to keep their skills up to date, especially if this comes with the credentials to match.

“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,” said Kevin Pitts Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. “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.”

Global appeal

The appeal for students is obvious, as degrees from elite universities hold the cachet of quality that perhaps local institutions lack. It remains to be seen whether local institutions will start offering a bulk of their curriculum from elite global institutions however.

The early forays of such licensing of curricula provide a clear direction of travel however. For instance, Britain’s Lancaster University have a partnership with Sunway University in Malaysia, whereby a joint degree costs around half what it would cost in the UK. The partnership has helped Sunway’s student body to treble in size in the past few years.

As countries around the world attempt to grapple with the skills gap, the potential for them to augment local tuition with that from a range of elite institutions is clear, but quite how this might impact less prestigious universities in the west remains to be seen.

One possible approach would be to develop teaching partnerships in the same way that research partnerships are commonplace now. For instance the White Rose University Consortium consists of researchers from York, Leeds and Sheffield Universities, and aims to enable each to punch above their individual weight. There are signs of such cooperation in curricula too, with Mexico’s Tec de Monterrey, Colombia’s Universidad de los Andes and Chile’s Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile combining their curricula.

“They’re three of the top universities in Latin America, and they decided they wanted to essentially combine their catalogs, and offer the totality of their courses on Coursera to each of the campuses and students,” Maggioncalda explains. “They’ve simply provided a unified catalog, and now want to co-author their courses in the same way as schools collaborate on research today.”

Universities are perhaps not the most adaptable of institutions, but innovations such as Coursera for Campus provide an interesting insight into how the sector might change as it attempts to better provide for the future of work.