UPDATED 15:30 EDT / AUGUST 31 2016

NEWS

Edtech platform Coursera targets enterprise with ‘Coursera for Business’

Online learning platform Coursera has just announced a new service aimed at tailoring its educational tools for big companies. The new Coursera for Business offers curated learning plans and powerful analytics, as well as the ability for businesses to create their own customized, co-branded portals for their Coursera services.

According to Coursera CEO Rick Levin, who previously served as president of Yale University, big companies have already been using the Coursera for training and continuing education for some time, and Coursera for Business will give corporations more control and better results for their unique needs.

“We’ve always known that many of our learners are housed within companies, and that many of you are using Coursera to build skills relevant to your jobs,” Levin said in a blog post. “Over the past four years, Coursera Certificates have become the second most-cited credential on LinkedIn; at the same time, our conversations with corporate leaders have highlighted the content, cost, and scale challenges of providing high-quality training and development opportunities to a distributed workforce.”

“These trends and insights have inspired us to develop a solution that enables your employers to build our courses and Specializations – offered by the world’s best universities and education institutions – into the fabric of their development programs that are meant to help you improve and grow at those companies.”

Levin said that employees are becoming increasingly interested in development, and that millennials in particular are more likely to stay with a company that offers a number of development opportunities. “Coursera for Business will help companies give these lifelong learners access to curated learning programs that draw on over 1,400 university courses, delivered through a robust online learning experience on both desktop and mobile,” Levin said.

Coursera is not the only online educational service around, but it is certainly one of the largest. According to Levin, Coursera currently boasts over 21 million registered users and offers classes from 145 university partners. These universities include a number of highly respected schools, including the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, Johns Hopkins University, and others.

For comparison, a 2015 report suggested that Khan Academy, perhaps one of the best-known edtech platforms, had around 12 million users per month as of last year. While Khan Academy is similar to Coursera in some ways, it is also very different in others. For example, while Khan Academy does offer college level lessons, its primary focus is school-aged children, and unlike Coursera, Khan Academy creates its own lessons rather than sourcing them from universities.

Photo by scui3asteveo 

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