Coursera launches CourseMatch, tool offers seamless experience for students and educational institutes

Global online learning platform Coursera has launched a new machine learning solution that will help universities across the world match their on-campus courses with the ones already present on this platform. Called CourseMatch, this solution will help university students access these programmes from home to maintain academic continuity amidst the coronavirus outbreak.

Emily Glassberg Sands, vice president of Data Science, Coursera, told Moneycontrol this solution will come in handy at a time when educational institutions are now opting to conduct online classes for students stuck at home.

"Universities can access our catalogue of 3,800 courses to find programmes that match their curriculum. Earlier, the institutes had to manually map the curriculum but now this is automated," she said.

What is CourseMatch?

CourseMatch is a machine learning solution that takes an institute’s on-campus course catalogue and matches each course to the most relevant courses in Coursera's catalogue of 3,800 courses. It can ingest catalogues in more than 100 languages and map them to the most relevant courses in English or in any of the 50 plus languages (translated and subtitled) available on Coursera.

Sands explained that the solution has already matched more than 2.6 million on-campus courses across 1,800 schools to courses on Coursera, from Johnson C Smith University in the US to Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona in Spain to the AICTE curricula in India.

Colleges and universities can access the solution directly at CourseMatch and search for their institution's catalogue. If their catalogue is not yet among the 1,800 available, these details can be sent to Coursera and this would be included on CourseMatch within two business days.

In India specifically, higher education institutions have not yet started full-fledged online lectures. Currently, these institutes are in the process of developing online relevant content that is engaging for the students.

Sands added that Coursera would also be open to collaborate with institutes to create relevant academic content for these educational institutions.  Further, she said that the modules and assessments will be available offline so that students can access it even in areas with low internet connectivity.

What about other higher education programmes at Coursera? 

Apart from this initiative, Coursera for Campus is a solution offered by this e-learning platform that can be used by universities to deliver online content to students and staff.

Sands said that since March 12, more than 2,600 colleges and universities around the world have activated Coursera for Campus programmes to take learning online and minimise student disruption. We’re humbled by the global response and are working hard to be even more useful to universities who need to move online quickly.

Coursera for Campus is a solution for educational institutions to offer relevant study programmes to their students. Amidst COVID-19, Coursera is offering this solution free of cost to institutions till July 31, 2020. Students will have access to these programmes till September 30, 2020, to complete their respective courses.