Training Development
On course to Coursera
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In a candid conversation with People Matters, Raghav Gupta, India Country Director, Coursera speaks about the e-learning ecosystem, learner engagement and Coursera's vision for the future
Coursera is an online education company that partners with 150 of the world’s top universities and education institutions to offer courses, specializations and degrees that empower learners around the world to achieve their career, educational and personal enrichment goals throughout their lives. Since its launch in 2012, the company has grown to accommodate over 2.1 million registered learners and delivers 2,000 courses, 180 specializations and four degrees.
In this interview, Raghav Gupta, India Country Director, Coursera discusses how the company aligns itself with enterprises to curate customized learning paths for its learners and how they consistently deliver on learner expectations.
How do you align with enterprises? Is it more about creating a Coursera window specifically for an organization, or is it about creating learning paths that are aligned to the requirements of organizations?
Let me first talk about what the objective is, and then how do we deliver that objective. Today, organizations come to us mostly for one of the three objectives — the first objective is regarding a specific training need, where a company may say, “We want to train 1,000 software engineers on data science and we want to train them in the next 3 months and then we want to put them on a billable project with the retailer in the US”. Second, a company may say, “Our business is changing, and we have done homework which says that 50-60 percent of the skills that we will need in 2 to 3 years from now are not in our organization today. So we want to start moving towards that objective today.” And we deliver on this through our highly customized learning. The third is building a wider culture of learning, because organizations are saying that business is changing, and what they want to build is a culture of self-learning and continuous learning.
To be able to do all this, Coursera for Business has four pillars — the first is content curation. Depending on the need, we look at our 2000 courses and 180 specializations, and say: here’s where your person is, here’s where he wants to go; and here’s the path from A to B. Second, if you are delivering this learning to thousands of people as an L&D team or an HR team, you need to be able to monitor it. So we have an admin dashboard, as per the requirements. Third, by working with other organizations, we are learning a lot including how, in a top-tier management consulting firm, do you keep management consultants (who already come from top-tier B-Schools), excited about learning even today. Or, how in a government organization, where people have not learnt anything new for the last 20 years, do you launch a new program, and still deliver effectiveness. Our customer success team brings a lot of insights to deliver programs like these. The fourth piece is customization — for example a customer may say, “This is great, but I also need something else like around assessment, or, if we can speak to a professor speak directly, as opposed to online?”
In the e-learning ecosystem, do you see other players co-existing with Coursera or do you think that one of the players will eventually emerge as the aggregator in the future?
Although marketplaces can be winner-take-all, I don’t think online education (or any form of education) is a winner-take-all space. What I mean by this is that consumer Internet businesses typically get structured like that — you might have one Facebook, one LinkedIn or Foodpanda or Swiggy, but there’s no place for a third party. However, education is not a marketplace as such.
It’s still early days in online education; so yes, bigger companies will emerge. We are currently the biggest, and are growingly rapidly as well. Globally, we add half a million learners every month, to our platform. But I think the objectives different companies are serving may differ.
There are companies that serve a micro-learning objective, for example, if I have forgotten how to use pivot tables, it helps me to learn how to do it in 30 minutes. But if I want to learn machine learning, which is a hot topic, but will take me 15 hours to learn, then I will come to Coursera.
Tell us more about your learners — learner segmentation, completion rates and learner engagement.
In terms of the kinds of learners on Coursera today, specifically the India learner profile, we could categorize it on various parameters. We do learner outcome surveys where we categorize learners as ‘career builders’, and ‘education seekers’, respectively.
India has a lot more career builders, than pure education seekers and many of the 2.1 million Indian learners are in the 22-40 age bracket who are career-focused individuals. The other segment is the 18-21 age bracket who are students in some university or college and are supplementing their college with Coursera. Three quarters tend to be men, and one quarter tend to be women in India, which I think is reflective of the gender mix in white collar jobs in India.
As compared to their global counterparts, Indian learner segment tells us that the impact of taking a course on Coursera has been higher for them. A larger percentage of learners say that their confidence was higher, they landed a new job or acquired a new skill etc.
From a completion standpoint, there are three ways to cut it. One is, a learner can take a course on Coursera and audit it, which means they get about 75-80 percent of the course experience. But they don’t do the assessments, and they don’t get the certificate; this is a free course. Second is, a learner in a personal capacity takes a course, pays for it, and can get a certificate on completing the course. And third is, as a part of Coursera for Business, a company sponsors it for the learner. In the first situation, the completion rates tend to be lower because there is no financial commitment. I came on to the platform, I was curious, I signed up to 2-3 courses and maybe I completed it or didn’t. In the other two, completion rates become interesting. On a paid consumer platform, the completion rate is around 60-70 percent, and when we work with companies, the completion rate tends to be between 70 and 95 percent.
What do you think determines the jump in completion rates, from a retail learner to a company-sponsored learner?
If you look at a retail learner, with let’s say the usual company-wide completion rate, it’s not very different actually. A 90 percent completion rate happens only when a company takes a boot camp or a mandated approach. But what does happen is we see more success when the following elements are there on the customer side:
How does your customer success team support a company in creating a culture of learning, given that it’s not a one-off thing but an ongoing change management process?
I think the biggest thing that’s needed in a program like that is stamina, because it’s a long-term program. Though the tools are not very different, what we really need is stamina. We do a quarterly business review with our customers, where our senior team comes in and makes sure that we are maintaining the momentum. We also have a Customer Advisory Board, where our top customers get invited and we show them what’s coming on the product, and seek their feedback.
Typically, building a culture of learning is a 2-3 year program, and the last thing you want is for it to become ‘one more initiative’ in the company. So we find various ways of maintaining momentum and keeping up the stamina.
How do you look at the learners’ needs and how do you use that to support them in their learning process?
Firstly, we need to know the right courses that we need to have on our platform. Secondly, we need to be able to take our 2000 courses and show the learner, two relevant courses out of them. Once the learner has made the selection, we need to make the learning experience a great one. And finally, we need to capture the feedback correctly.
We have a content strategy team that works with leading tech companies and universities to research, for example, on the skills that are needed in the next 2-3 years. We have a partnership with Google, for Google Cloud platform, with IBM Watson for Internet of Things, and so on.
Once a learner comes to our platform, we ask them about their skills and that in turn enables us to use that information to suggest a bunch of courses to them. That’s where the personalization of the learning pathway is developed; and this is happening in a retail environment because we are directly speaking to millions of learners around the world. When it is in a business environment, we work with the company and develop learning pathways for the learners. And once the learner signs up for the courses, we make sure that the learning experience is tremendous and that we deliver content in an engaging manner.
What would be your advice to L&D heads and business heads who want to ensure that their learners are actually learning?
Firstly, any such meaningful initiative has to be driven from the top. For instance, the AT&T CEO says “Unless you are spending 5-8 hours every week on learning a new skill, you will be redundant in two years”. So it has to be a senior-level initiative. Secondly, in terms of planning it, it has to be a ‘business-plus-L&D’ initiative.
L&D needs to be integrated with the business. Thirdly, I think a lot of times learners find themselves asking the question from HR: When should I do this learning? Should I do it in office, on my commute, or during the weekend? Companies actively need to give people time to do this.
Fourthly, it is important to spend adequate time in curating the learning content. We have seen two extreme ends of the spectrum. One being - “here is one course that you should do, and you have no choice”. I think being too definitive may not be the right approach. The other extreme is opening up Coursera for the 2000 courses and asking the learner to choose any course. So extremes don’t work, but a mix of balanced push and pull does.
What’s the vision 2020 for Coursera India, and how are you looking at breaking that down into achievable proportions?
Our primary goal is to grow manifold. If we just look at the English-speaking career focused learner in India, that number is huge; and I think we have just scratched the surface. Our enterprise business is seeing great traction, and we need to build that further. On the government side too, there’s huge opportunity for us, as the government of India is putting in a lot of emphasis on digital education and skilling initiatives.
To achieve our vision, we will be taking one step at a time. We need to sign up the right companies to be our customers, and then put our energies in the right places and deliver success, so that more such customers follow. As long as we keep taking the right steps, we should be on the right path.
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