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What began as an immediate response to the COVID-19 health crisis will transform higher education in the long term.
Coursera recently published its 2020 Impact Report, which detailed its analysis of the drastic changes in the way the world learns; the report covers the span between September 15, 2019, to September 15, 2020. It describes that students around the world are looking for high-quality online learning options. Universities are marking the beginning of a new digital transformation era. Workers are learning job-relevant skills to stay competitive, and public health officials are urgently training thousands of contact tracers on a grand scale.
“Institutions are acting boldly to support their learners and workers through an unprecedented unemployment crisis. Students need job-ready learning, employees need effective skills for remote working, and displaced workers need to regain employment. This crisis has made clear that we need institutions to enable access to education at every stage of civic life,” said Leah Belsky, Chief Enterprise Officer at Coursera.
What began as an immediate response to the health crisis will transform higher education in the long term. Coursera has 150 participating member universities, 3800 courses, 385 specializations, 17 MasterTrack certifications, and 20 undergraduate degrees. The MOOC platform has also been a pioneer in launching several initiatives to help students and institutions every step of the way, providing them access to free content and work-relevant skills and resources on their platform.
For its part, in the industrial sector, Coursera has 50 partners, 580 courses, 83 specializations, and 18 professional certifications, not to mention its presence in 2300 companies, 3700 campuses, and 325 government agencies. It has also promoted initiatives in 140 countries to provide learning to tens of thousands of refugees.
Coursera was founded in 2012 with the mission of providing universal access to world-class learning. In the words of Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera, “at no time in Coursera’s history has this mission been more relevant or urgent. The world is facing unprecedented economic disruption, and the need to develop skills for a digital future is even more apparent now. The pandemic has created irreversible changes to the ways universities, enterprises, and governments operate — and online learning will be at the heart of how the world responds.”
Since mid-March, more than 21 million people have joined Coursera, increasing 353% over the same period last year. The countries with the most students enrolled in this platform are the United States, followed by India, Mexico, China, and Brazil. There has also been a 444% increase in Coursera course enrollments, making a total of 50 million inscriptions.
The most sought-after training skills include contact tracing (as a result of the pandemic), digital marketing, project management, the Python language, social psychology, JavaScript, algorithms, graphic design, regression analysis, and data structures.
Are you interested in developing a specific skill? Coursera has an extensive catalog of available resources, just a click away!
Translation by Daniel Wetta.
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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