By Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO, Coursera
Today, we’re proud to announce that Coursera has reached more than 100 million registered learners worldwide. As we mark this milestone, it’s inspiring to reflect on our evolution as a global learning destination since we launched in 2012. What started a decade ago as an experiment by Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng is now one of the largest online learning communities in the world.
I’m also excited to announce that Andrew Ng, alongside DeepLearning.AI and Stanford, is launching a new version of his original Machine Learning course, this time as a Specialization. On our ten-year anniversary, one of the first and most popular courses ever published on Coursera will be updated and expanded to help learners develop the right skills for today’s machine learning roles. The new beginner Specialization joins Coursera’s rapidly expanding catalog of 5,000+ courses, 2,200+ projects, 600+ Specializations, 75+ certificates, and 30+ degrees, all created in partnership with more than 250 leading universities and industry educators.
As the Coursera catalog and learning platform have grown over these last 10 years, our commitment to the mission remains unchanged: to transform lives through learning. That mission is most apparent in the personal stories of learners, like Emma in Australia, who reskilled and switched fields while on maternity leave; Bharathan in India, who pushed past vision loss to launch an AI career; and Ehab in Germany, who could keep pursuing his dreams after fleeing his home country amid conflict. These are just three examples out of the millions of unique learner journeys that occur on Coursera each day.
We’re especially heartened to see online learning reach individuals across many regions and backgrounds. Emerging economies including Ethiopia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, and the Philippines reported some of the highest rates of new learner growth in 2020 and 2021. Additionally, roughly half of Coursera’s global learners identify as women, and there has been encouraging enrollment growth among women learners in STEM courses and job-focused certificates over the last two years.
These transformative learning experiences wouldn’t exist without our university and industry partners. We’re grateful for their shared commitment to our mission of increasing access to quality education. As we look to the next 10 years and beyond, we’re eager to find new ways to unlock even greater access to high-quality education for learners around the world.