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Free online courses aren’t replacing traditional four-year colleges any time soon. But they are steadily gaining ground with job seekers looking to pick up new skills, which they can parlay into new careers. Now, one online course provider, Coursera, is helping these online learners showcase their work to some of the country’s leading tech companies.
Coursera announced today that it’s teaming up with companies like Google, Instagram, and Shazam to design special projects for students pursuing so-calledSpecializations on Coursera. Specializations, which Coursera rolled out last year, are like mini-majors for Coursera learners. They comprise several courses within a given subject, such as data science.
At the end of a Specialization, students complete a capstone project to prove what they’ve learned and can pay to receive a certificate of completion. Now, several of those capstone projects will be designed and judged by some of the country’s most venerated employers.
For a recent pilot program, for instance, Google challenged students in the Mobile Cloud Computing Specialization to design a mobile cloud computing app from scratch. Now, it’s considering some of those apps to be featured in the Google Play store.
Instagram, meanwhile, is working with the University of California San Diego to create a capstone project for the Interaction Design Specialty. Students will be tasked with creating a “new social experience,” which will be judged by Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger and a UCSD professor.
“My courses on interaction design in college had a lasting impact on the design of Instagram, and my career,” Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger said in a statement. “As our devices become increasingly powerful, it’s essential that we create a generation of designers and builders who can help people around the world harness that power.”
Talent Tap
That companies like Google and Instagram are investing their time in a program like this is, in many ways, a validation of the promise that companies like Coursera, Udacity, and edX are making to job seekers. Originally founded as free alternatives to standard four-year education, all of these providers of so-called massively open online courses, or MOOCs, have turned their attention toward job training in recent years, and companies are starting to take notice.
In partnering with Coursera, these companies are tapping into a pool of talent they might not have otherwise encountered. A full two-thirds of Coursera students live outside the United States, and one-third of them come from the developing world. And while these companies aren’t promising to hire any Coursera graduates just yet, the partnership could play a role in expanding their hiring horizons.
“It’s showing that companies care about these programs and are interested in the outcomes,” says Rick Levin, who served as president of Yale for 20 years before becoming CEO of Coursera last year. “They’re taking the time to design a project for students. You’ve got to think that’s going to lead to, maybe, interviewing someone who completed the course.”
Tech Cachet
Unlike its a la carte courses, Coursera Specializations aren’t free. They cost anywhere from $166 to $490 a piece, though financial aid is available to some students. That means the more appealing Coursera can make Specializations to users, the more revenue the company stands to make. The cachet of a large tech partner should certainly help lure students, particularly those outside of Silicon Valley.
Still, it’s important to note that while online credentials may be gaining more respect from employers, they’re far from the norm. For many employers, a college degree is still a ticket for entry, and Levin for one, says it’s unlikely that any elite universities are going to start giving those away online for free any time soon.
For one thing, he says, online courses are far less comprehensive than on-campus courses. “If credit’s going to be granted it’d be granted in fractions of what a semester-length course would carry, and changes like that take universities a long time to cope with,” Levin says. “I don’t see it happening overnight.”
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