Help is here: Coursera for Campus launched to augment university capacity

With technology transforming whole industries at a blistering pace, it’s become virtually impossible for higher education to keep up with industry’s talent demands.

Yet, universities still shoulder the bulk of the responsibility for human capital development.

Across the world, learning institutions have been pulling out all the stops to adapt their curriculum and teaching methods to meet modern business needs. Many have taken whole courses online, introduced microlearning options to supplement their educational offering and introduced entirely new courses in emerging fields such as robotics, blockchain and the internet of things.

But try as they might, because of the way today’s educational systems are structured, learners of today may still find themselves graduating with skills that are two, maybe three years behind.

This is what Coursera hopes to solve with Coursera for Campus.

The popular online learning platform said the new feature is designed to help any university, including those outside its partner ecosystem, to use its content to deliver “job-relevant, multi-disciplinary online learning” to students.

“With more than 300 million people entering the workforce in the next 10 years, universities urgently need to augment their capacity to meet the aspirations of a young and growing demographic,” the company said in launching the feature.

Coursera for Campus will provide institutions access to more than 3,600 courses to enhance their core curricula, offer credit-eligible and supplemental learning to students, and deliver lifelong learning to their alumni, faculty, and staff. 

In addition, faculty can also use Coursera’s tools to author content, assessments and hands-on projects. These educators can also improve learning outcomes by tracking student skill mastery and growth, using the platform’s learning analytics.

In a nutshell, Coursera for Campus offers universities the ability to:

#1: Provide current students with job-relevant learning and credentials

This is done with universities integrating Coursera courses with their core curricular as credit-eligible, blended and supplemental learning. The platform currently already offers course collections according to different fields (ie. engineering, business, etc). Universities can offer these collections directly or tailor it to their students’ needs by swapping out courses with new ones, taking from Coursera’s current course portfolio or creating one themselves. Features such as sign-on, API integration, gradebooks, and plagiarism detection will help universities incorporate Coursera for Campus easily into its current systems.

#2: Enable faculty to author and scale online programmes for free

This is a nifty feature for university faculty members who may want to design their own lessons, courses, assessments or projects to make them available to their students and alumni. With the learning analytics, faculty will be able to track progress easily to better understand the learning pace of their students.

#3: Lifelong learning for alumni, faculty and staff

As we mentioned earlier, learning cycles today have sped up because of technology; what you learn today may no longer be applicable tomorrow. The Coursera for Campus feature solves this as learning materials are constantly updated to ensure they are relevant to current needs. This helps faculty and staff to ensure their knowledge is on par with industry standards.

“The market for skills is evolving, and education must evolve with it. To reduce skills gaps and spread opportunity widely, we need to be flexible and adaptive,” said Matthew Rascoff, Associate Vice Provost for Digital Education and Innovation at Duke University. 

“Coursera for Campus complements our core curriculum, allowing thousands of Duke students to advance their skills for a digital world.

Coursera for Campus was launched following extensive pilots in more than 20 university campuses around the world, including Duke University, University of Illinois, and Manipal Academy of Higher Education.

It is now available to universities, with full functionality to be rolled out over the next few months.