MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwired - Aug 31, 2016) - Coursera, the global leader in online education and learning, today announced the launch of Coursera for Business, the company's enterprise platform. Coursera for Business enables companies to utilize Coursera's learning content, created by 145 world-renowned universities and other institutions, to help address the rapidly evolving training and development needs of their businesses. Coursera has signed up leading companies including L'Oréal, Boston Consulting Group, and Axis Bank across key markets in the United States, Europe, and Asia as its first customers. The launch marks Coursera's entry into the multi-billion dollar global corporate online learning market, which is growing at the rate of over 10 percent a year.
"Coursera was founded to help transform lives through access to high quality learning experiences, and we've seen extraordinary success in supporting people's career goals. We recognize that one of the best ways we can scale the impact of Coursera and our university partners is by working with the organizations that share the vision of equipping their employees with the knowledge and skills to excel in their careers," said Rick Levin, Coursera's CEO. "Employers recognize that in today's workplace, industry-specific skills can go from relevant to obsolete within months. With Coursera for Business, we're leveraging our success in supporting learning goals at scale to meet organizational objectives and to help businesses attract and retain top talent."
Learning Solution for the Modern Business
Coursera reaches over 21 million registered learners globally, and has proven that online learning is having a real, tangible impact on these individuals' career readiness and growth(2). Coursera for Business builds on Coursera's offering for individuals to give businesses a solution that meets corporate learning challenges such as the rapid pace of change across industries, workforce scale and reach, and business skills alignment.
"We believe in learning for all, and our goal is to touch 100 percent of L'Oréal's employees every year whether they work in our corporate offices or one of our factories," said Laurent Reich, L'Oréal's Governance and Digital Learning Director. "In order to achieve that, we aim for 50 percent of an employee's development time to happen through digital or self-directed learning. We love that the Coursera platform will allow us to provide a breadth of high quality programs and a learning experience that our employees can self-select into to drive their own personal development."
Coursera for Business offers:
- Curated, In-Depth Content from Top Universities: Coursera content experts create custom learning programs that cover business, technology, data science, and a variety of other skills to meet each business's unique learning and development needs. With over 1,400 courses and 150 Specializations available on Coursera, content is sourced from 145 of the world's best institutions and provides both breadth and depth to meet the learning needs of a wide range of employees and companies.
- Reputable, Stackable Certifications: Coursera's university content is structured so that employees can start with a single course and build seamlessly toward a Specialization (composed of several courses) or an accredited degree. Course and Specialization Certificates are co-branded by top global universities, making them a lasting investment in employees' personal brands. As the second most shared credential on LinkedIn's list of the Top 100 Certification Providers, Coursera's Certificates are already a popular way for employees to showcase new skills.
- Flexible and Mobile Learning Meets Enterprise Scale: Flexibility and choice are central to the Coursera for Business learning experience. Employees can complete coursework on their own schedules not only on the web but also on a robust mobile platform that serves the needs of a workforce increasingly dominated by millennials.
- Centralized Program Management and Progress Tracking Analytics: Employers can spend less time on paperwork with features like centralized billing, group communication, single sign-on (SSO), and LMS integration. Coursera for Business also provides easy-to-use reporting and tracking tools that allow companies to measure the real impact of an employee development program.
"To compete in today's volatile business environment, an organization must be resilient," said BCG's Andrew Dyer, Senior Partner and Managing Director. "It needs strong capabilities to achieve sustainable success. At BCG, we help clients build core skills and capabilities of their people by partnering in a variety of ways. Digital learning is a key element of our skill-building approach. We feel privileged to work with Coursera to deliver top-quality online learning to our clients and our employees."
Coursera for Business supports Coursera's university partners by enabling them to reach new learners who are beyond college and into their career.
"The most exciting part of teaching on Coursera for me is the opportunity to reach a global audience of people at the beginning, middle, and even end of their careers who just don't have the time and resources to return to a university campus for a full-time degree program. Now, Coursera for Business will enable university professors like me to have an even greater impact on people's lives and career trajectories after college," said Alex Cowan, faculty at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business and instructor of the Agile Development Specialization on Coursera.
For more information about Coursera for Business, visit coursera.org/enterprise.
About Coursera
Coursera is an online education company that offers courses and learning experiences from the world's top universities and education institutions including Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, Duke University, University of Virginia, and University of Michigan. Coursera has more than 21 million registered learners worldwide who can access over 1,400 courses and Specializations in dozens of topics including business, technology, social sciences, health, and art. Coursera empowers learners around the world to achieve their career, educational, and personal enrichment goals throughout their lives. Coursera is backed by leading VCs such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, New Enterprise Associates, GSV Capital, International Finance Corporation, Laureate Education Inc., and Learn Capital.
For more information, visit www.coursera.org.
(1) Technavio Report, "Global Corporate E-learning Market 2016-2020"
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-corporate-e-learning-market-164000323.html
(2) Harvard Business Review, "Who's Benefiting from MOOCs, and Why"
https://hbr.org/2015/09/whos-benefiting-from-moocs-and-why