Is Coursera for business going to be the next big thing for you?

It is a very large growth area and it is a focus area as well, given that we have quickly grown to be working with 1,900 companies worldwide. And a lot of these relationships are getting bigger. A lot of these companies start with say 2,000 people and once they see the success, it might go up to 5,000 or 10,000 people. We work about 175 companies in APAC (Asia-Pacific) and more than 55 companies in India. We are seeing quite a bit of growth momentum there.

Who is driving growth for you—enterprises or individual consumers?

In percentage terms, because enterprise is a newer business so the growth is higher; we grew 200% last year in enterprise. The consumer business is also growing quite strongly, but in percentage terms, it would be a little bit slower because that’s already a large business. We are using almost 100,000 individual users in India every month, and globally about half a million every month.

What are the skills and courses Indians more interested in?

A lot of these are technology and data science courses. So, it could be a course on AI, cryptocurrency, Google Cloud, machine learning, and data science. There are some in the business domain or the softer skills domain, for example—’Learning how to learn’ is one of the top courses. Compared to global trends, in India there is a higher skew towards technology and business; and personal development is a little bit lesser.

Online learning has evolved significantly in the past few years and many newer players have entered as well. How do you distinguish yourself from the others?

Our mission is to bring high-quality education to everyone in the world. The kind of people that we are reaching and the kind of educational content we are taking, that is important. For many years Coursera was only a consumer platform. Now we have Coursera for business, Coursera for governments, and Coursera for universities. Initially, we were only a MOOC platform. We added specialisations, degrees. Online education is expanding. A lot of businesses are undergoing digital transformations, education is coming in late into the digital story. Today, when a student can learn from a professor who is the best professor in the world, why should that student be listening to somebody who is not high quality.

Tell us about your partnerships with universities.

There are two kinds of partnerships—one is a content creation partnership and the other is a content consumption partnership. On the content creation side, ISB is a Coursera partner. Their content is on our platform; some of these are business courses and some are life purpose courses. For example, there is a course called—A Life of Happiness and Fulfillment, which is really popular. We also want to get other leading Indian universities to author content for us.

The other part is Coursera for universities platform, where along with what universities are teaching on campus, we take the content to the students and the faculty; there we are working with Manipal University and our intent is to announce a lot more partnerships.

How are you planning to expand your consumer base?

As a part of the stackable model—which is course, specialisations, master tracks, and degrees—we also have professional certificates. And that is for somebody who is not necessarily looking for higher education but is looking for career-relevant skills and professional certificate for that. For example, last year we launched something called the Google IT support professional certificate. This is meant for people who have not necessarily completed their graduation but want to start a career in IT. Similarly, we have an IBM customer service certificate. So, somebody who wants to work in a BPO or call centre organisation can come and learn skills around customer service; it is not ML or AI. These have seen a very good response. So the professional certificate is something we think we will expand quite a bit.

Are more people in India paying for online learning?

What happens globally and in India is that people come and sign up for a few courses, get a feel of what it is like; and once they get familiar with it, some will convert to taking a full-paid course, and we are seeing that. That’s consistent with what happens in India and the world.