Coursera, the world’s leading online learning platform, announced free versions of Coursera for Campus and upgraded features to address the critical and long-term needs of higher education worldwide. New features allow universities to deliver academic integrity for credit-bearing online learning, improve student employability, and author private courses. Today’s announcement builds on the momentum of the Campus Response Initiative, which was launched in March to give students and faculty free access to Coursera for Campus during pandemic-related closures. Currently, more than 3,700 institutions use Coursera for Campus to deliver online learning to over 2.4 million students.
“The pandemic has been a catalyst for universities to make online learning the core of their student experience,” said Jeff Maggioncalda, Coursera CEO. “We’ve grown from 30 universities using Coursera for Campus to over 3,700 in just seven months, and these upgrades will help them better deliver for-credit online learning and job-relevant skills for their students.”
With three offerings, Coursera for Campus is committed to supporting students and institutions in every stage of online learning: • The Student plan gives every university student free access to unlimited Guided Projects for hands-on learning and one course annually*. Like all learners on the Coursera platform, students can gain job-relevant skills at their own pace with mobile and offline access. They will also have access to the online help center. • The Basic plan provides up to 20,000 free student licenses to every university. Every license includes access to unlimited Guided Projects and one course annually*. This long-term free offering includes basic plagiarism deterrence features and access to the online help center. • The Institution plan provides unlimited Guided Projects and unlimited course enrollments for each student license. It also enables universities to author, grade, and manage for-credit online learning programs with enhanced academic integrity.
The upgraded features of Coursera for Campus enable universities to:
Deliver credit-bearing online learning with advanced academic integrity features
Faculty can now administer secure, high-stakes exams and detect plagiarism in assignments on Coursera for Campus. It supports online proctoring with integrations like ProctorU and allows exams to be timed and scheduled. Over the next few months, Coursera will enhance exam security with third-party ID verification tools. For assignments, integrations with tools like Turnitin auto-detect plagiarism for both students and graders.
Improve student employability with job-relevant learning Using Coursera for Campus, universities can help students gain marketable skills with Professional Certificates from industry educators like Google, IBM, Facebook, Intuit, Salesforce, and Amazon. Launched in March, Guided Projects give students hands-on experience with tools like Python, SQL, HTML, Jupyter Notebooks, Java, R, Tensorflow, and Google Analytics. Students can learn these skills in under two hours and apply them in interviews and on-the-job.
Build blended online learning programs with ready-made courses and private authoring tools Faculty now have access to the same powerful authoring platform as Coursera’s university content partners. They can efficiently build custom courses, hands-on projects, assessments, and even embed Zoom recordings with Live2Coursera.
Over the coming months, Coursera will roll out a new curriculum tool that will help faculty curate Coursera content to fill curriculum gaps, teach new specialties, and focus programs on specific disciplines or difficulty levels.
Bridge the digital divide with mobile learning that can be downloaded and viewed offline 70% of Coursera for Campus students used a mobile device for their learning during the pandemic. With mobile and offline learning, students can download courses, synchronize progress and quizzes, take notes with highlights, and calendar sync – all optimized for low data consumption.
With Coursera for Campus, universities in Bangladesh served more than 99,000 students who have enrolled in over 1.2 million courses. Higher education institutions have used Coursera for Campus to enable continuous learning, offer supplemental content to their degree programs, and prepare students for jobs and internships. Among them are leading institutions like American International University- Bangladesh (AIUB), North South University, Daffodil International University and Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology.
“Disrupted by the pandemic, the education ecosystem is going through a massive digital transformation. The 21st-century knowledge economy and a rapidly evolving job market require new-age solutions. Building a hybrid education system with technology and high-quality content at the core is the future of learning, said Dr. Carmen, Vice-Chancellor of American International University, Bangladesh. “Coursera for Campus platform has allowed us to deliver multidisciplinary and job-relevant content to our students. We are excited to see it launch new platform features that are central to academic rigor.”
