An intriguing strategy tweak is taking shape at Coursera, the pioneer of massively open online courses, or MOOCs. While Coursera still opens its (virtual) doors wide to anyone who wants to take a free course for the fun of it, the company also is welcoming big firms such as
The business case is obvious. Measured by non-dollar metrics, Coursera has become an education giant, barely two years after its founding in early 2012. The Mountain View, Calif., company offers more than 700 courses in subjects ranging from emotional intelligence to linear circuits. It has built a globe-spanning list of renowned teaching partners, including the universities of London, Colorado and Melbourne,, while attracting more than seven million signups. The vast majority of students enroll for free, however, and that means Coursera's revenue is comparatively tiny.
To make money, Coursera needs to charge either students -- or their employers. Last year, Coursera introduced its Signature track, in which students pay about $50 to take verified exams and earn a certificate of completion that's meant to carry weight in the workplace. Some students have signed up on their own. But if corporations steer large groups of their employees toward specific Coursera offerings, that's an even more reliable way to get paid.
There's a delicate line to be walked here, says Coursera's new chief executive officer, Richard Levin. "We don't want to become just a jobs-skills provider," he said in a recent interview. Unlike another leading online-education site, Udacity, which does focus on career-related courses in technical fields, Coursera likes to pack its course catalog with the full range of academic offerings, including plenty of esoteric fare. But Levin wants Coursera to be a workplace factor, too. "We want companies to recognize our credential," he remarked.
At MasterCard, two Coursera offerings have attracted a following, says Charles Silvestro, the payments company's vice president for global talent development. One is a course on web applications that's been offered to 2,500 employees; the other is a behavioral economics class taught by Duke professor Dan Ariely that's been offered to 300 marketers.
"Our chief marketing officer has a keen interest in behavioral economics," Silvestro explains. So word went out in the marketing department that the Ariely/Coursera class might be a fine way to get up-to-speed in this new area. Silvestro says he doesn't have data about how many MasterCard employees actually started or finished the online class, but he says "at least 25 or 30 people asked me about it."
MasterCard has a generous tuition-reimbursement program for employees, says Janice Burns, the company's chief learning officer. Employees working toward an undergraduate degree can get up to $7,500 a year of tuition expenses paid by the company; employees pursuing a graduate degree enjoy a cap of $11,000.
So far, though, Coursera's one-class-at-a-time offerings haven't been slotted into MasterCard's formal reimbursement program. Burns and Silvestro say that some department managers may be covering costs of Coursera's Signature service on their own initiative, but MasterCard at this stage isn't requiring or even urging students to sign up for the Signature track. That might come later, Silvestro says. For now, his main concern is making sure that employees can engage with Coursera in whatever format is most comfortable for them, whether that involves paying for the experience or not.
