Coursera has announced free versions of Coursera for Campus and upgraded features to address the critical and long-term needs of higher education in South Africa. The company says that these features allow universities to deliver academic integrity for credit-bearing online learning, improve student employability, and author private courses. Currently, more than 3,700 institutions use Coursera for Campus to deliver online learning to over 2.4 million students, of which more than 6,800 are in South Africa.
“The pandemic has been a catalyst for universities to make online learning the core of their student experience,” said Jeff Maggioncalda, Coursera CEO. “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.
“Coursera for Campus has been a great enabler for this next step of innovation by offering job-relevant, multi-disciplinary learning”, said Prof. Rory Ryan, Executive Director of Academic Development and Support at University of Johannesburg. “Since launching Coursera’s free initiative for universities, we’ve had over 30,000 enrollments and more than 84,000 learning hours registered. We are delighted with the results of this initiative and we are very proud of our UJ community”.
Coursera for Campus has three offerings which it says “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*. This long-term free offering includes basic plagiarism deterrence features and access to the online help center.
- The Institution plan provides unlimited Guided Projects and unlimited course enrollments for each student license. It also enables universities to author, grade, and manage for-credit online learning programs with enhanced academic integrity.
The upgraded features of Coursera for Campus enable universities to:
Bridge the digital divide with mobile learning that can be downloaded and viewed offline
Coursera for Campus helps universities equally serve students, including those with limited connectivity, bandwidth, and devices. 70% of Coursera for Campus students use a mobile device for their learning during the pandemic. With mobile and offline learning, students can download courses, synchronize progress and quizzes, take notes with highlights, and calendar sync – all optimized for low data consumption. The platform also includes digital-first engagement tools to maximize learning effectiveness like bite-size videos, in-browser programming assignments, and Guided Projects for hands-on learning.
Improve student employability with job-relevant learning
Using Coursera for Campus, universities can help students gain marketable skills with Professional Certificates from industry educators like Google, IBM, Facebook, Intuit, Salesforce, and Amazon. Launched in March, Guided Projects give students hands-on experience with tools like Python, SQL, HTML, Jupyter Notebooks, Java, R, Tensorflow, and Google Analytics. Students can learn these skills in under two hours and apply them in interviews and on-the-job.
Skills development analytics in Coursera for Campus can help faculty track student progress and close employability skills gaps. They can also use skill-based Academies on Coursera to help students develop skill sets required for specific job roles.
Deliver credit-bearing online learning with advanced academic integrity features
Faculty can now administer secure, high-stakes exams and detect plagiarism in assignments on Coursera for Campus. It supports online proctoring with integrations like ProctorU and allows exams to be timed and scheduled. Over the next few months, Coursera will enhance exam security with third-party ID verification tools. For assignments, integrations with tools like Turnitin auto-detect plagiarism for both students and graders. Students can check their Similarity Score before submitting an assignment. Faculty can view all suspected and confirmed plagiarism incidents in Gradebooks.The platform also supports plagiarism deterrence by disabling URL sharing and copying of peer reviews.
Question Banks make it easy to author rigorous, custom assessments at scale. Faculty can create assessments with any combination of auto-graded multiple choice and manually-graded essay questions. They can privately author questions and randomize them based on learning objective and difficulty level. This feature will roll out widely by the end of the year.
Build blended online learning programs with ready-made courses and private authoring tools
Universities can efficiently build custom courses, hands-on projects, assessments, and even embed Zoom recordings with Live2Coursera. Strategies and resources for effective online teaching are also available on the Coursera Teaching Center.
Over the coming months, Coursera will roll out a new tool that will help faculty curate Coursera content to fill curriculum gaps, teach new specialties, and focus programs on specific disciplines or difficulty levels.
Coursera for Campus also offers administrative tools and LMS integrations that allow faculty to manage the end-to-end student experience in one platform. Student scores are auto-tracked in Gradebooks and custom filter analytics are available to drive performance insights. Faculty can also auto-enroll students in custom course sequences with fixed scheduling capabilities coming next year.
With today’s launch, Coursera for Campus is ready to meet the enduring needs of higher education institutions worldwide. For more information about each offering, visit www.coursera.org/campus.
*Some course exclusions apply.
