How Coursera plans to expand business in India

Founded in 2012, Coursera is an American massive open online course provider platform that works with universities and other organisations to offer online courses, certifications, and degrees in a variety of subjects.

In a recent conversation with YourStory’s Daily Dispatch, Raghav Gupta, Managing Director, India and APAC, Coursera says that the pandemic has been a period of rapid disruption as it has caused quite a bit of shift in structures across various platforms. Income levels have seen a decline for a number of households across the country, and this has led to a sudden demand for reskilling and upskilling towards roles of the future.  

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According to Raghav, research at the market levels indicate that more than 87 percent of the companies in the country are now focusing on increasing digitisation. Thus, while there are a lot of job losses, a lot of new jobs are also being created in digital and data related domains, and one can see a massive growth in the number of learners in these fields.

“Coursera is a platform that serves not just learners, but educators and institutions as well,” says Raghav.

He adds that Coursera works with 170 leading universities and 70 companies that provide content on the platform, and recently even announced the addition of many leading Indian institutions that will provide content for the platform. “We have announced partnerships with IIT Mumbai, IIT Guwahati, Ashoka University as well as Indian Statistical Institute (ISI),” he says.

Additionally, Coursera has also partnered with Philips India to provide content in the subject of ventilation. Working with a number of businesses, the platform’s customers include Reliance, L&T, ITC Infotech, and others. He added that Coursera is also setting up a service center that will cater to the India, Asia-Pacific and Global markets. “India is going to be the regional hub for all of Asia-Pacific,” says Raghav.

Speaking about the platform, Raghav says the median age for students from India is 27 years, which is higher than what is noticed in the other parts of the world. A combination of courses in the domains of technology, data science and business are popular on the platform. The most popular is Programming for Everybody which is a course on Python provided by the University of Michigan. Courses provided by Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, Yale University are also quite popular in India. 

Coursera is now working on bringing more content from Indian partners onto the platform. They recently announced five new certificate programs from IIT Roorkee, IIT Mumbai, IIM Kozhikode, etc. Coursera has also been working on bringing product features that are relevant for learners in the country.

“We have partnered with Zoom, and we recently launched a new product feature which is called Live2Coursera,” says Raghav.

On investments, he says the company thinks they are key elements of serving the country, one of which is expanding the team in the country. In the pre-pandemic period, Coursera had 21 employees in three locations, which has now grown to 100+ people. The aim is to take that number up to 150.

“We are no longer limiting the talent that we are getting on board,” says Raghav.