Coursera ramps up online learning features for students

Coursera, one of the world's leading online learning platforms, today announced free versions of Coursera for Campus and upgraded features to address the critical and long-term needs of higher education in Bangladesh and the rest of the world.

New features allow universities to deliver academic integrity for credit-bearing online learning, improve student employability, and author private courses.

Today's announcement comes following Coursera's 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, CEO of Coursera.

"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," he added.

With the three new 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. 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. The Institution plan provides unlimited Guided Projects and unlimited course enrolments for each student license. It also enables universities to author, grade, and manage for-credit online learning programs with enhanced academic integrity.

With the upgraded features, Coursera for Campus enables university faculty to administer secure, high-stakes exams and detect plagiarism in assignments on Coursera for Campus. The new features will also enable universities to improve student employability with job-relevant learning through marketable skills with Professional Certificates from industry educators like Google, IBM, Facebook, Intuit, Salesforce, and Amazon.

The faculty will now also have access to the same powerful authoring platform as Coursera's university content partners so that 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.

The new mobile and offline-learning feature will allow students to download courses, synchronise progress and quizzes, take notes with highlights, and calendar sync -- all optimised 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.

Dr. Carmen, Vice Chancellor of American International University, Bangladesh, said, "Disrupted by the pandemic, the education ecosystem is going through a massive digital transformation. Building a hybrid education system with technology and high-quality content at the core is the future of learning. 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."