The massive open online course (MOOC) sector has exploded recently and it seems that every startup is looking to one up each other with more courses and services. Online education is starting to become very competitive and in order to stay ahead of the curve, Coursera announced the addition of 29 universities to its panel and students can now takes courses from these prestigious institute for free trough Coursera.This makes a total of 62 educational organizations that including 16 new international institutes. Rival startups like edX have also recently added international courses through their own educational partners and this is a welcome addition because it allows users to take courses in a different language. Students on Coursera can now take classes in French, Spanish, Chinese and Italian. The multilingual course options will also provide a entire new customer base for the startups that will be a relevant part of future growth strategies.
Coursera is also increasing the depth of its offerings by adding 90 new courses bringing its total to 313. Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng states that, “With the addition of so many new courses across a wide range of disciplines, languages and academic approaches, we are now able to meet the needs of a more diverse student body, and give students more academic options to explore.”
Coursera was opened to the public in April 2012 and has seen 2.8 million students register so far and is hitting 1.4 million course subscriptions every month.
The rapidly increasing userbase has given the startup the confidence to start experimenting with monetization techniques. They recently started a Career Services feature which lets users signup for a recruitment program. Coursera has also added Verified Certificates which charges a fee to verify that a student has taken a specific course. The startup has continued on the path of credentialing and it has gotten approval from the American Council on Education for five courses for “credit equivalency.” That means that after completing the courses students can “receive college transfer credit at institutions that accept ACE recommendations.”
Coursera’s new additions include:
California Institute of the Arts (CalArts)
Case Western Reserve University
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Curtis Institute of Music
École Polytechnique, France
IE Business School
Leiden University, Netherlands
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat München
National Taiwan University
National University of Singapore
Northwestern University
Penn State University
Rutgers University
Sapienza Università di Roma
Technische Universität München (TUM)
Technical University of Denmark
Tecnológico de Monterrey
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
The University of Tokyo
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Universidad TecVirtual del Sistema Tecnológico de Monterrey
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
University of California, San Diego
University of California, Santa Cruz
University of Colorado Boulder
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
University of Geneva, Switzerland
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
University of Rochester
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Source: TechCrunch
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