How it works is: 1 Students enroll in a course and 2 are charged every month until they either, earn a professional certificate by completing every course in that specialization or canceling their enrollment in the course.
Coursera suggests each course lasts approximately four to twelve weeks. Each college or university that enrolls in the Coursera for Campus Program will get access to up to 20, free student licenses and over 4, courses to learn from. Coursera is partnering with over global universities and companies , like Google, Princeton University, HEC, and Yale, to help government organizations and countries around the world strengthen their workforce through developing new skills for new jobs.
Former Yale president Rick Levin took the reins of the company in , which he passed on in to Jeff Maggioncalda who has led the company ever since. Over the coming years, Coursera continued to add on business and university partners as well as students to its platform. Stay-at-home orders due to the novel coronavirus gave people more time at home — which many of them spent upping their skills.
Coursera also made various positive contributions, for instance by offering governments free access to their courses for people that became unemployed. As a result, Coursera decided to go public to capitalize on those favorable market conditions. Today, over people are employed by the company which operates offices across the world in countries like Colombia, India, or the United States. Nowadays, the company makes money through a multitude of offerings, ranging from certifications to subscription services.
Coursera operates on a freemium business model , allowing students to take courses for free. They only need to pay if they seek to acquire an accreditation such as certificates or degrees. Coursera utilizes a subscription-based model for its professional certificates. This means that students will pay a monthly fee to access the course content. If users have a thirst for even more knowledge, they can opt into Coursera Plus , which grants access to over 3, courses, Specializations, and Professional Certificates.
The main selling point of those degrees is the fact that they can be obtained at a much lower rate, oftentimes half of what on-campus degrees would cost. According to Coursera , the average age for a student is 35 years while possessing 14 years of professional work experience. The degrees are led by the same professors that teach the on-campus programs.
Scholarships are available to selected students to ease the financial burden. In October , Coursera announced that they would put assignments and homework behind a paywall. Now, only those people who paid for a certificate would be able to access these assignments.
With this change, Coursera had effectively started charging for content. In Feb , Coursera experimented with mentor-guided courses, an initiative which allowed learners to pay extra for mentor support.
Ten courses were chosen for the pilot with 50 slots for mentees. The pilot was discontinued shortly after its launch. Eventually, Coursera shut down their old platform and forced everyone to move to the new on-demand model.
In this process, hundreds of Coursera courses were lost forever. In June , Coursera began offering a few courses that were only open to paying users. A few courses which had been free were now paid. Despite the reversal on the first paid courses, fully paid courses have now become more numerous on Coursera.
In August , Coursera launched Coursera for Business. Now, businesses could purchase Coursera content for their employees. Then in October, Coursera changed the pricing of Specializations. Previously, learners bought the Specialization course by course and paid a fixed price per course. These features remained enabled as long as learners were paying the subscription fee.
They could also pay a larger amount to get access to all the premium features for the entire Specialization for 12 months. This option is no longer available. At the Coursera Partners Conference, Coursera revealed some details about how many paid learners they have. At that time, they had over , monthly paid active learners and were adding least 20, more every month. By this point, the original MOOC model involving free courses, large numbers of people who would take a course at the same time, and free certificates had practically disappeared.
Over the past several years, Coursera had removed free certificates, put graded assignments behind paywalls, adopted a subscription model for payment, switched to an on-demand model for course delivery, and increased the monetizable content on the platform by soliciting bids from universities.
In April , Coursera introduced another tweak to the model: a seven-day free trial for Specialization subscriptions. Users could now get access to premium features for free for a week, but would have to provide a credit card to start the free trial.
That same month, Coursera made some changes to its financial aid policies. For a long time, Coursera was pretty liberal with its financial aid and was quick to approve aid applications. I personally applied for financial aid and was approved instantly. In October , Coursera announced that it had approved 1 million financial aid applications. At launch, six courses were eligible for the verified track; students facing economic hardship can apply for financial aid.
It may be that a handful of popular courses drive this number: In an interview back in April, Wharton professor David Bell mentioned that 10, people signed up for Signature Track in his Intro to Marketing course, part of the Wharton Foundation Series.
Coursera is also increasing the number of courses eligible for Signature Track. There are also a growing number of courses around 40 which do not offer a free Statement of Accomplishment, leaving the Verified Certificate as the only option for acknowledgement of course completion. Some students have been quite vocal in their opposition to this policy and have even dropped courses out of protest.
After the course starts, users are asked to sign up for a verified certificate via different prompts. In the forums, students in Signature Track have a badge identifying them as Signature Track users, which also increases the visibility of the program. In Jan , Coursera announced Specializations, which consist of a group of related courses designed to help students deepen expertise in a subject. Currently there are over 25 such programs available in several subject areas, from data science to writing.
To obtain a Specialization certification, a student has to earn a verified certificate in each of the course listed under that Specialization. The final step is a capstone project described further below.
To give us an idea of this impact, we can look at John Hopkins University, which recently shared details about their Data Science Specialization , consisting of nine courses and a capstone project.
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