Coursera to introduce online undergraduate degree in computer science

Coursera, a California-based online education company will release six new online degree courses, which will be fully equivalent to on-campus degrees, taking their tally of full degree courses to 10.

This will be the first time the online education promoter would offer an undergraduate, or a bachelor-level degree in computer science. The University of London is offering the course on the Coursera platform.

The degree courses offered by Coursera were started in 2016, and are fully equivalent to full-time degrees taken on campus, thus promising students with not just education but also with university certification, which is crucial for securing quality jobs.

“While talent is distributed equally across the world, the opportunity is not, and this acts a serious impediment to acquiring jobs and improving quality of life. This is precisely what we are trying to address,” Coursera Chief Executive Officer Jeff Maggioncalda told Business Standard.

“We are working with our university partners to build degrees on top of our open online learning platform that is high quality, modular, affordable, and scalable,” Coursera said in a press release.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was the first institution to offer a full Masters in Business Administration degree on the platform, which is adding Masters in Computer Science, which is also being offered by the Arizona State University. Masters degree in public health is being offered by the University of Michigan from United States and Imperial College London.

University of Michigan is offering a first-degree course in data science on Coursera.

After more than a decade after the inception of the massive open online courses (MOOCs), rapid progress in technology and the speed of data transfer has enabled unprecedented growth in the learners registered on such domains, and promises quality world-class education to those who have the will, but not the resources to educate themselves.

Certification courses on the platform involve recorded video and interactive quizzes, but the degree courses have live lectures and interaction with professors and co-students as well, which is “at par with best global education standards,” says Maggioncalda.

Founded in 2012, about 150 universities across the world are offering 2,000 courses online, which have benefitted more than 30 million learners worldwide. Indians stand second in accessing courses on the platform with 2.9 million learners, behind the US which has 6.8 million of its residents who have taken up education on it.(See chart)

Source: Coursera

 

In India, the Indian School of Business is the lone institution offering a course on the platform. Thus, though India is a front-runner in consumption of online education, Indian institutions are yet to embrace the distance learning model, which Maggioncalda admitted.

“There are certain regulations which make it difficult for an IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) to teach online on our platform,” he added.

In a country like India where more than a third of its populace lies in the 15-24 age group, making them the most employable, however, access to quality education is still a far cry, when only 20 per cent of eligible students actually take up higher education, according to the all India survey on higher education.

The indigenous online education portal Swayam, developed by the ministry of human resources has 51 courses on its website, out of which, 32 pertain to engineering.

As data becomes the oil, there is a growing uncertainty and excitement over what the new upcoming regime has to offer in terms of employment, especially to the youth. In India, the youngest developing country, the need is probably the strongest.

In a bid to expand their footprint in India, Coursera has 36 enterprise partners in the country, which includes Airtel, Axis Bank, Infosys, Tata Communication, Manipal Group, AXA to name a few. It has about 900 enterprise partners worldwide.

Airtel enrols employees who need specialised training in courses pertaining to network technologies and cloud computing, Axis Bank focuses on data analytics, Tata Communications on machine learning and the Internet-of-Things.