Coursera Adds 29 Schools, 90 Courses And 4 New Languages To Its Online Learning Platform

It’s almost as if there’s an arms race in online education. Which MOOC platform can expand the fastest? Place your bets now. On the heels of edX’s announcement that it will be expanding internationally with the addition of six new schools (bringing its total to 12), Coursera is doing some addition of its own. Today, the massive online course platform announced that 29 universities from around the globe have agreed to bring their courses online (for free) via Coursera. The new members will join the 33 institutions already on board, bringing Coursera’s grand total to 62. And, of course, just as edX was kicking back to celebrate its five new handpicked international members, Coursera announces that its updated roster just so happens to include 16 international institutions itself. The international expansion of both Coursera and edX is a big win for international students, who (at least in Coursera’s case) now have access to courses in multiple languages, including French, Spanish, Chinese and Italian. Of course, international expansion is also an important part of the roadmap for edX and Coursera (and online learning sites like Lynda.com as well) and could be a boon for both, exposing a whole new audience of potential MOOC adopters to courses from some of the most reputed schools in the world. While edX is a not-for-profit organization, Coursera is decidedly for-profit and, though it has plenty of venture capital in the bank, will need to continue scaling if it hopes to become a sustainable business over the long-term. To do that, as part of the introduction of 29 new schools to its platform, Coursera is also expanding its course offerings by subject, adding 90 new courses to bring its total to 313 courses in all. “With the addition of so many new courses across a wide range of disciplines, languages and academic approaches, we are now able to meet the needs of a more diverse student body, and give students more academic options to explore,” Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng said as part of the announcement. Since launching in April 2012, Coursera has registered 2.8 million students and is now seeing around 1.4 million course enrollments each month. Lately, Coursera has been taking some pronounced steps to begin monetizing its growing user base as well, launching Career Services in December — an opt-in recruiting program that matches students with employers — and adding Verified Certificates in January

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