Coursera — an online learning platform — will be making 3,800 courses free for people who have lost their jobs due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent global economic crisis, a private media outlet reported.
“We are proud to announce Coursera Workforce Recovery Initiative to help governments worldwide provide unemployed workers with free access to 3,800 online courses,” a statement read.
The objective of the initiative is to support affected workers in developing knowledge and skills to get employed again.
These free courses are covering skills like business development, information technology (IT) and data science skills, and they are taught by the world’s leading universities, including the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Duke University, University of Michigan and Yale among others.
Courses on professional certifications like Google IT support, IBM Data Science, or Date Engineering with Google Cloud are also available to train people for high-demand jobs.
This step towards public and private sector partnerships is imperative, and various government leaders have made the initiative available to their respective states and countries.
Earlier, Google and YouTube also launched new resource pages to help teachers and families continue to educate students under quarantine.
Coursera works with universities and other organisations to offer online courses, specialisations and degrees in a variety of subjects, such as engineering, data science, machine learning, mathematics, business, computer science, digital marketing, humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences and others.
Coursera was founded in 2012 by Stanford University computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller.
Princeton, Stanford, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania were the first ones to offer content on the platform.
Offerings have since expanded to include specialisations — collections of courses that build skills in a specific subject — as well as degrees and a workforce development product for businesses and government organisations.
