Online education platform Coursera, which offers massive open online courses, specialised courses and online degrees, is looking at the corporate learning and development market to boost revenue.

“We will soon announce a tie-up with a top Indian IT company... to reskill their existing software engineers in data science,” Nikhil Sinha, Chief Business Officer, Coursera, told BusinessLine . The company has also launched its enterprise platform — Coursera for Business.

On why Coursera is foraying into the corporate learning space, Sinha said the platform already has many individual learners who work at some of the largest companies in the world.

Organised training

“Corporate employees were already seeing the benefits of what we were providing and signing up…The idea was that the company itself can provide our learning to their employees in a more organised fashion which matches the company’s needs and the learner’s needs and with administrative tools to track progress to make learning a successful experience.”

The company has already tied up with LG Electronics in South Korea, L'Oréal in Europe, BNY Mellon and BCG in the US to impart training. It is also looking at a pipeline in India, Singapore and Malaysia.

“Companies have typically gone to top B-schools to provide executive education to their top employees. Now, they can impart similar learning to more employees at a fraction of that cost,” Sinha said.

Coursera believes that its tie-ups with over 145 of the world’s top 200 universities that offer content on its platform will give it an edge to take on competition in the $31-billion global corporate learning market.

“We believe in three years from now, corporate learning market will be a significant part of our revenue. The number of learners in this space will be lower but it is a big revenue opportunity for the company,” Sinha added.

Focus on SME segment

Moreover, the company which is eyeing top corporates, is also aware of the potential market in the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) segment in India. “We understand that there is a small and medium enterprise market in India. We will have a solution for that market in the first quarter of next year,” he said.

Globally, across all courses that Coursera offers, the US is the top revenue churner for the company. Currently, India is the second biggest market for Coursera with 1.7 million learners of the 21 million registered users globally. China, Brazil and Mexico are big markets as well.

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