Asian learners flock to global education platform
- Justin Harper
Coursera, the world’s largest online education platform, has seen phenomenal growth in Asia-Pacific, and now has more than 12 million learners in the region. They are a combination of those looking to further their careers, and workers being upskilled by their employers.
The most popular courses are within the domains of business management, technology and data sciences.
In an interview with HRM Asia, Raghav Gupta, Director for Asia-Pacific, revealed the latest figures for the region, which have grown from 10 million learners last year, and eight million in 2017.
Coursera collaborates with 160 of the world’s top universities including Stanford, Yale and Columbia along with the National University of Singapore, and Nanyang Technogical University, and Peking University in Asia-Pacific. It also works with around 30 companies who are educators on the platform, including technology leaders Google and IBM Watson.
The biggest markets in the region are India, China, Australia, Pakistan, and Singapore.
In Singapore, Coursera offers courses within the government’s SkillsFuture scheme and works directly with the Civil Service College, along with 22 companies including the Bank of Singapore.
“Financial services companies are undergoing massive digital transformation and those companies getting more impacted by technology are playing a more active role when it comes to upskilling employees,” Gupta said. “For banking, the whole back end is changing.’’
Along with financial services, the industries facing the biggest impact from technology in the region are telecoms, manufacturing, and professional services.
