By Jeff Maggioncalda, Coursera CEO
The pandemic has been a catalyst for universities to make online learning core to the student experience. In March, we launched the Campus Response Initiative to give students and faculty free access to Coursera for Campus during pandemic-related closures. Since then, we have grown from 30 universities using Coursera for Campus to over 3,700, serving more than 2.4 million students who have enrolled in 21.4 million courses worldwide. As the crisis persists, higher education continues to face unprecedented challenges.
Today, we are announcing long-term free versions of Coursera for Campus and upgraded features to address the mission-critical needs of higher education institutions globally. These new features allow universities to deliver academic integrity for credit-bearing online learning, improve student employability, and author private courses.
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
As universities look to build long-term online learning programs for students, they must ensure their experience meets the academic rigor of campus learning. Coursera for Campus now offers academic integrity features that enable universities to deliver credit-bearing online learning.
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. Students can check their Similarity Score before submitting an assignment. Faculty can view all suspected and confirmed plagiarism incidents in Gradebooks. The platform also supports plagiarism deterrence by disabling URL sharing and copying of peer reviews.
Question Banks make it easy to author rigorous, custom assessments at scale. Faculty can create assessments with any combination of auto-graded multiple choice and manually-graded essay questions. They can privately author questions and randomize them based on learning objective and difficulty level. This feature will roll out widely by the end of the year.
Improve student employability with job-relevant learning
The pandemic has placed enormous pressure on job opportunities, and students need to graduate with high-demand skills to gain employment. 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.
Skills development analytics in Coursera for Campus can help faculty track student progress and close employability skills gaps. They can also use skill-based Academies on Coursera to help students develop skill sets required for specific job roles.
Build blended online learning programs with ready-made courses and private authoring tools
With online learning now core to the student experience, universities need an effective way to create and curate high-quality online curricula. In addition to 4,200 ready-made online courses from leading universities and companies, 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. Strategies and resources for effective online teaching are also available on the Coursera Teaching Center.
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.
Coursera for Campus also offers administrative tools and LMS integrations that allow faculty to manage the end-to-end student experience in one platform. Student scores are auto-tracked in Gradebooks and custom filter analytics are available to drive performance insights. Faculty can also auto-enroll students in custom course sequences with fixed scheduling capabilities coming next year.
Bridge the digital divide with mobile learning that can be downloaded and viewed offline
Coursera for Campus helps universities equally serve students, including those with limited connectivity, bandwidth, and devices. 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. The platform also includes digital-first engagement tools to maximize learning effectiveness like bite-size videos, in-browser programming assignments, and Guided Projects for hands-on learning.
“The pandemic has been a punctuation moment in higher education. Faced with unprecedented urgency, educators are working hard to prepare for the ‘new normal’ of blended learning. At the peak of disruption, Coursera for Campus allowed us to serve impacted students of our Kunshan campus. We are excited to see it launch new features that are critical to providing academically rigorous and job-relevant online learning that both faculty and students would find valuable.” –Matthew Rascoff, Duke University Associate Vice Provost for Digital Education and Innovation
Higher education institutions worldwide 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 Duke University, University of Michigan, Johnson C. Smith University, Africa Nazarene University, Southampton University, IIM-Udaipur, Symbiosis Institute of Technology, and Colegio de Estudios Superiores de Administración.
“We chose Coursera to strengthen our existing course offering, infuse work skills into all elements of our teaching, expand our offering in the domains of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data literacy and be a global education brand. We’ve had outstanding training and support from Coursera in onboarding students. In just four weeks, more than 1,100 students have enrolled in over 4,400 courses.” –Dr. Stanley Makhosi Bhebhe, Africa Nazarene University Vice-Chancellor
“The pandemic disrupted the education system world over. While most educational institutions were not prepared for the challenge, identifying its impact early on, we devised a digital strategy and partnered with Coursera to take advantage of a wide variety of courses available on the platform. Coursera for Campus has enabled us to offer our students the most relevant high-quality content across topics, complementing their knowledge and skills for the new job market.” –Professor Janat Shah, IIM-Udaipur Director
The resilience that universities and students have shown during these challenging times is inspiring to all of us. With today’s launch, we are taking bold steps in enabling universities to create a more inclusive and job-relevant higher education experience for everyone.
For more information about each offering, visit www.coursera.org/campus.
*Some course exclusions apply.
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