Coursera for Business

2300 enterprises signed up for Coursera for Business, including 25% of the Fortune 500 companies. According to Coursera’s 2020 Impact Report published in September of this year, the company served 550K enterprise learners.

Pandemic Response & Impact

Coursera’s pandemic response has four key components. If you want to learn how other providers responded to the pandemic, Class Central has got you covered.

Free Certificate Courses

In late March, the company announced they’d be making 85 of their certificate courses free till the end of May. The offer duration and its course list were extended twice.

In total, Coursera made 115 certificate courses free till the end of 2020. The offer proved immensely popular. It became Class Central’s Report most popular article ever, with three million pageviews.

Class Central compiled a list of over 100 providers that offered their online content for free during the pandemic.

Free COVID-19 Courses

Coursera launched courses about COVID-19. Many became some of the most popular online courses of 2020. The top one was Johns Hopkins’ COVID-19 Contact Tracing which crossed over a million enrollments, resulting in at least 340K completions.

Here is a comprehensive list of 50+ COVID-19 courses launched by different providers.

Free Coursera for Campus

On March 12th, Coursera announced they’d give free catalog access to all higher-ed institutions impacted by the pandemic via Coursera for Campus. Universities can sign up to give 5000 of their students access to Coursera’s catalog of 3800 courses and 400 specializations.

According to Coursera, this offer was taken up by over 10K departments, schools, and universities, benefitting 1.7M learners.

According to Coursera’s 2020 Impact Report, Coursera for Campus is used in 3700 campuses and has 2.4M learners in total.

On June 1st, Coursera announced free catalog access for all university students. Simply put, it’s Coursera for Campus, except universities don’t need to apply to join the program. The caveat is that you need an email address provided by your university, and your university’s domain should be part of Coursera’s database.

This led to 1.2M enrollments.

Free Coursera for Government

On April 24th, Coursera extended a similar offer to governments, this time via its Coursera Workforce Government Recovery initiative. It would allow governments to give unemployed workers access to Coursera’s catalog. Each government would receive up to 50,000 licenses.

This effort attracted 1.1 million learners across 70 countries, resulting in 6.6 million course enrollments.

According to the 2020 Impact Report, Coursera for Government is used by 325 government agencies and 725K learners.

Fundraising, Monetization, and Revenue

According to The New York Times, before the pandemic, Coursera projected its revenue to grow 30% to reach over $200 million. The pandemic pushed it well past that number. You can learn more about Coursera’s monetization journey here.

This helped Coursera raise $130 million in a Series F funding round at a $2.5 billion valuation. Last year, the company raised $103 million, reaching a $1 billion valuation and achieving so-called “unicorn” status.

In total, the company has raised $464 million. According to Coursera, the last funding round brings the company’s cash balance — that is, the amount of money the company has on hand — to $300 million.

Coursera might very well IPO next year.

In 2020, Coursera introduced Coursera Plus, a $400 annual catalog subscription. They started testing the offering in 2019, as first revealed by Class Central’s Report.

A couple of months ago, we reported that Coursera was testing a $59 monthly catalog subscription. Currently, this monthly pricing hasn’t been widely deployed.

Guided Projects via Coursera Project Network

Over the years, Coursera has been very picky regarding university partners. Universities that aren’t ranked highly have not been allowed to offer courses on Coursera.

In 2020, this has changed, to a certain extent.

Last year, Coursera acquired Rhyme, an edtech startup based in Sofia, Bulgaria.

The company’s software allows learners to use their browser to access virtual environments. These environments can be preconfigured to include all the software and tools needed for a project. In addition, they can include embedded video instructions for students to follow along.

In 2020, Coursera started calling Rhyme courses “Guided Projects” and launching them under the Coursera Project Network.

These project-based courses cost $9.99 and generally take under two hours to complete. In theory, this could be really useful for students, but Coursera’s execution leaves a lot to be desired.

At Class Central, we even stopped listing these courses in our catalog.

To scale the creation of these courses, they started accepting applications from “subject matter experts” around the world at teach.coursera.org.

The topics (and potentially quality) seem all over the place. Some feel too small — like they should be part of a broader course. And some feel like they shouldn’t be courses at all…

Another drawback is that you can only launch the virtual cloud desktop six times. Also, the interface, with its side-by-side virtual desktop and video instructions, is a bit clunky. And these courses can’t be accessed on mobile.

You can see all the guided projects here: https://www.coursera.org/search?query=guided%20projects

At Class Central, we stopped listing Coursera’s new guide projects. We felt that a lot of these didn’t fit well alongside university courses in our catalog (nor on Coursera’s!).

Leadership

In 2020, Coursera’s leadership saw two changes:

• Betty Vandenbosch replaced Dil Sidhu as Chief Content Officer.
• Ken Hahn became the Chief Financial Officer replacing Tom Kovats, VP of Finance.

Here is how the current leadership team looks (excluding advisors):

• Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO
• Shravan Goli, Chief Product Officer and Head of Consumer Revenue
• Kim Caldbeck, Chief Marketing Officer
• [+] Betty Vandenbosch,  Chief Content Officer
• Rich Jacquet, Chief People Officer
• Richard Wong, Vice President of Engineering
• Leah Belsky, Senior Vice President of Enterprise
• [+] Ken Hahn, Chief Financial Officer
• Xueyan Wang, Vice President of Services
• Anne Tuttle Cappel, General Counsel
• [-] Dil Sidhu, Chief Content Officer
• [-] Tom Kovats, Vice President of Finance

In 2020, Coursera also added three new members to its board of directors:

• Sabrina Simmons, who recently served as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Gap Inc.
• Ted Mitchell, currently serving as president of the American Council on Education (ACE) and previously U.S. undersecretary of education under President Obama.
• Amanda Clark, Chief Development Officer of Papa John’s International.

Coursera Virtual Partners Conference 2020

Coursera’s annual partners conference is usually limited to the provider’s partners. Non-partners, like Class Central, are not able to attend.

But due to the pandemic, many conferences, including Coursera’s, went online and expanded access to non-partners.

As first-time attendees, our impression of the conference was that of a polished sales pitch firmly directed towards universities, extolling the benefits of partnering with Coursera.

You can find the conference highlights and video links on Class Central’s Report here.

New Branding/Logo

We noticed Coursera testing a new logo on their homepage. It’s not visible in all regions.

Coursera’s In-Course Data-Driven Features

Early this year, we took a look at some of Coursera’s in-course data-driven features, including timely interventions and auto-matching quiz questions with relevant review material.