India to be key in Coursera's plan to enrol 100 million learners by 2022

Online learning platform Coursera is looking to touch 100 million learners in the next three years, from the present 45 million, and is looking at India to meet the target.

India, which already has 5 million registered learners, will play a key role in this growth target, said Shravan Goli, Chief Product Officer and Head of Consumer Revenue, Coursera (Global).

In an interaction with Moneycontrol, Goli said that India has been a popular market for the platform and that they have added more than a million learners till November.

Goli said that since the access to education is uneven, the idea is to offer courses that will help candidate become job-ready.

"Students have the opportunity to learn from 170 universities across the world including Stanford University, University of Michigan and University of Pennsylvania among others. We now also have 30 companies like Google, IBM, Boston Consulting Group, Amazon Web Services and Cisco on this platform offering programmes," he said.

From India, Coursera has Indian School of Business (ISB) and Indian Institute of Management Calcutta on board. Goli said that they are in talks with several Indian institutes, especially now that there is higher appetite to go online.

"We added over 1.05 million learners in 2018 in India. In 2019 till November, we have added 1.36 million learners in India. Hence, this is a high-growth market for us," added Goli.

Among the various countries, the United States followed by India and China are the top five markets for Coursera.

Out of the $100 billion education market in India, online education space in India is expected to constitute around $1 billion. Players like Coursera, edX, Udemy and upGrad are among the prominent players in this space.

Helping minimise dropouts

In online education programmes, students dropping out before completing the programme has been a cause of concern. This translates to a waste of online resources created for this purpose.

However, Goli said that they are now involved in personalising the training modules by bringing in relevant content.

"Not just programmes like artificial intelligence or data analytics, even soft skills are English and communication that are being offered," he said.

Free courses continue to see low completion rates. Completion rates are less than 10 percent for such courses.

But when it comes to paid courses, Goli said that the completion rate is more than 50 percent. Further, if it is an enterprise-led programme (courses where the company pays for a certain number of employees to acquire a new skill), the completion rate is over 80-90 percent.

The best performance, however, is for the Coursera for Campus modules where students take up courses that add up their degree credits. Here the completion rates cross 90 percent.

Coursera for Campus enables any university to offer high-quality job-relevant courses to students, alumni and staff. In India, Coursers works with Manipal Institute of Technology, NMIMS, Shiv Nadar University, UPES University and Pearl Academy among others.

Goli said that the platform is currently working to get other institutes on board. This initiative was started in October 2019.

A minimum of 30-32 percent annual growth is what will take Coursera to the 100 million learners by 2022. A mix of retail and corporate clients is what they are eyeing to reach this mark.