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Coursera announced in July that they crossed 1 million registrations as China became their second largest market, overtaking India. Most US consumer Internet companies have a hard time breaking into China.
Cultural differences and the Internet firewall are a huge barrier to entry. Even tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter have pulled out or found themselves on the wrong side of the Chinese firewall. So how did Coursera, a relatively young company, achieve this significant milestone?
To increase their China footprint, Coursera has partnered with a number of local companies and universities. The local partnerships usually revolve around two things: translations and distribution.
To localise the website and translate its content, Coursera partnered with Guokr, a Chinese social networking site, and Yeeyan, a translation community.
For distribution, Coursera partnered with NetEase to create a Coursera Zone on 163.com, a NetEase-hosted, Chinese-language portal to Coursera.org. To improve performance for its Chinese users, Coursera also stores local copies of its videos on NetEase servers.
Before becoming the CEO of Coursera, Rick Levin was the President of Yale University, serving the longest tenure in the school’s history. One of the hallmarks of his tenure was cultivating relationships internationally, especially in Asia, and particularly with China.
Levin met two Chinese presidents (Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao), as an honorary appointment at Fudan University and was elected to the board of the National Committee on United States-China Relations.
Thus, Rick Levin brought connections and credibility to his role at Coursera with respect to its China strategy. It would probably not have been difficult for him to initiate conversations at the very highest levels at prestigious universities, but more important is his experience in working with university and government leaders on issues that were important to them.
This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.
This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.
