By Shwetabh Mittal, Senior Director, Product Management

The world has changed a great deal since I last posted. I hope all readers of this blog are well and safe during these unprecedented times. 

We continue to enhance the Coursera platform in response to data and your feedback, as we strive to create and deliver the insights and tools that will enable you to achieve your learning goals and objectives, and power your business forward.  Let’s take a look at our major releases this quarter. 

Skills Development Dashboards Update

We first launched Skills Development Dashboards in 2019 as a means to provide you with key insights about your learning programs—how to understand your organization’s level of skill mastery, identify top learners, and assess the competitiveness of your talents relative to industry benchmarks. These insights are made possible through leveraging exclusive data from our 60+ million registered learners worldwide. 

This quarter, we’ve updated our Skills Development Dashboards with a number of powerful enhancements, including the ability to now track a total of 35 critical skill areas. With the addition of these new skill areas across various domains, you can measure digital literacy, technical knowledge, soft skills, and more. We’ve also introduced the Conversant proficiency level, which will help you more accurately assess the proficiency of your learners as they progress through their skill journeys. We’ve additionally made visual improvements so you can more easily differentiate between the different skills domains you are tracking.  

Guided Projects

Guided Projects are compact, focused learning experiences that drive skills mastery through hands-on learning on real-world tools, in virtual cloud workspaces. Guided Projects are designed to be completed in less than two hours, allowing learners to quickly gain job-relevant skills. In every Guided Project, learners can follow step-by-step instruction from subject matter experts, and no software downloads or IT setup are required to get started.  

Working in collaboration with the Coursera Project Network—our select community of subject matter experts—we are developing a rapidly growing catalog of Guided Projects across mission-critical domains including data science, computer science, and business. With hundreds of Guided Projects available now, and hundreds more launching by the end of the year, your learners will find a wide range of projects they can use to learn valuable, job-relevant skills. Guided Projects offer an excellent complement to full courses on Coursera, and by combining the two, you can deliver the comprehensive learning program that is ideal for your organization.

Private Authoring

An important additional feature is the ability to create your own Guided Projects with private authoring capabilities.

We recognize that even with our extensive catalog of more than 4,300 courses and projects from over 200 university and industry partners, there are still organizational needs unique to your company that our existing offerings may not address. Private authoring offers a new solution. By the end of this quarter, we will be offering all of our customers a full private authoring toolkit that makes it possible for you to create your own Guided Projects, assessments, and courses. 

As an example of how private authoring can benefit an organization, let’s say that your company has a custom implementation of Salesforce or Tableau. A privately authored Guided Project would be ideal to show new employees how your organization uses these tools. Additionally, through private authoring of assessments, you can create proprietary measurement tools to ensure that your learning program is driving the learning outcomes you’re looking for. Finally, with private authoring of courses, you can produce full courses around the subjects and topics that matter most to your organization and your learners. You can even combine these different content types to develop a comprehensive learning curriculum that is specifically tailored to the needs of your organization.   

The team is excited to bring you these new capabilities. Be sure to watch a replay of our quarterly release webinar here to learn more about how our updated Skills Development Dashboards, Guided Projects, and private authoring capabilities can help you. Happy learning!

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