Online learning platform Coursera grew over 49 per cent in India over the past 12 months emerging as the second largest market globally with around 12.5 million users while the US reported 16.6 million users as of June-end. Nearly 7.5 million new learners in India were added since January 2020 and overall course enrolments stood at 24.6 million as of June-end.

This comes at a time when the technology sector in India is facing a major talent crunch. Most employers are rushing to upskill existing employees to meet client demands boosted by the restructuring of businesses processes during the pandemic. Consequently, the top courses that attracted maximum enrolments from India include ‘Programming for Everybody’ from University of Michigan, ‘Machine Learning’ from Stanford University, ‘English for Career Development’ from University of Pennsylvania, ‘Python Data Structures’ from University of Michigan, ‘Financial Markets’ from Yale University and ‘AI for Everyone’ from DeepLearning.AI.

“India will be our global hub for certain APAC regions. We will have a few servicing groups around the world but India will be the core hub for servicing our learners around the world especially the Asian region,” Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO, Coursera said.

Hiring plans

Coursera’s team in India grew from 21 employees in January 2020 to 101 employees in August 2021. It plans to grow to 150 employees by December this year, hiring mainly for its content production team. Over 50 per cent will be remote hires.

“Our teams in India broadly focuses on two aspects, they work with partners on creating content and with the customers for delivering the content. We will be expanding our content production team and other roles related to customer success, implementation and skills transformation,” Raghav Gupta, Managing Director- India and APAC, Coursera said.

New partnerships

On Wednesday, the edtech major announced that it is adding nine new enterprise clients to the existing 90 plus customers for its ‘Coursera for Business’ offering. These include Reliance Industries, Larsen & Toubro, Wipro GE Healthcare, Usha, ITC Infotech, Welspun India, StarTek and Vardhman Group. The B2B offering had 176,000 learners as of June-end and around 6,10,000 course enrolments starting from January 2020.

Going by the industry trends, Coursera also launched five post-graduation certificate courses with IITs and IIM. It went live with 5G and IoT and VLSI Design courses with IIT Roorkee, Digital Transformation and Power Electronics and Motors for Electric Vehicles certificate courses with IIT Bombay, and Data-Driven Decision Making Certificate from IIM Kozhikode.

Coursera has been tying-up with several over 1,100 campuses across the country co-creating courses for its students, accessing over 1.5 million learners as of June end, with 14.1 million course enrolments since January 2020. It added 16 new colleges recently.

It is currently working with eight State governments for its Workforce recovery offering including Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, TASK in Telangana and Tamil Nadu. Between April to December 2020, Coursera got 47,000 learners and 3,12,00 course enrolments under the offering.

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