Coursera expanding partnership with PH universities

U.S.-based open online course provider Coursera is planning to expand its partnership with local universities, growing its presence among academic institutions in the Philippines which have widely received the platform.

Raghav Gupta, Coursera managing director for Asia Pacific, said recently that they planned to expand their partnership with the Ayala and Yuchengco-led investment holding company iPeople Inc. by making their online courses more available to university students and faculty.

“What we are doing now is that we are expanding this partnership to go from covering about 6,000 students and faculty to covering closer to 16,000 students, faculty and possibly, alumni in the future,” Gupta said.

The Coursera executive said they have seen great success in the integration of their courses, with more than a hundred thousand enrollments this year alone, with completion rates of more than 80 percent.

The schools under the iPeople group include Mapua University, and its subsidiaries– the Malayan Colleges Laguna in Cabuyao, Malayan Colleges Mindanao in Davao and the Malayan High School of Science.

Other institutions of higher learning in the group are the Naga-based University of Nueva Caceres, the National Teachers College and the APEC chain of private high schools.

Ipeople Inc. chairman and chief executive officer Dr. Reynaldo B. Vea said the group’s partnership with the global learning platform Coursera complemented their core and objectives.

“The vision of Mapua is to be among the best universities in the world. This partnership fits right in with that vision. Students get to be exposed to international standards of education. We get to deal with global companies and bring them into our own system of education,” he said.

“Our relationship with Coursera is certainly a big part of our teaching process in Mapua,” Vea added.

Meanwhile, Ayala Corporation managing director and management committee member Alfredo I. Ayala said the partnership came about in their pursuit of innovative partners in different areas.

“”We were lucky to pilot in 2019, pre-pandemic, and get things ready. And then of course when the pandemic changed the world and really unlocked the potential of how to make quality education accessible to the biggest population possible, which is really our underlying vision,” Ayala said.

According to Coursera, 113 million people in the Philippines have registered to their platforms as of September 2022, which represents a 23 percent growth.

The most popular courses taken in the Philippines in 2022 are: (1) Foundations: Data, Data, Everywhere from Google; (2) Foundations of Project Management from Google; (3) COVID-19 Contract Tracing from John Hopkins University; (4) The Science of Well-Being from Yale University; (5) Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design from Google First Step; (6) Korean from Yonsei University; (7) Technical Support Fundamentals from Google; (8) English for Career Development from University of Pennsylvania; and (9)Foundations of Digital Marketing and E-commerce from Meta.

Photo caption:
From left to right: Dr. Renaldo Vea, Chairman and CEO of Ipeople Inc.; Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera; Fred Ayala, Managing Director and Member of the Management Committee of Ayala Corporation; Raghav Gupta, Coursera managing director for Asia Pacific.

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