Coursera CEO: Why It's Time To Move More Degrees Online

Coursera’s flagship online MBA offering has grown from zero to over 1,000 students in just two years. CEO, Jeff Maggioncalda, says distance-learning prepares students for the future of work

If you want a glimpse through the keyhole of online learning, look no further than Coursera.

The online learning platform now boasts around 2,700 MOOCs—Massive Open Online Courses—from 150 universities, and it keeps expanding.

Coursera has built up an audience of millions of degree-hungry philomaths—once they take a bite, it seems, they are open to more and more commitment. More than 50% of the students on Coursera’s degree programs began life as consumers of singular modules on the platform.

Coursera has also just added six more fully-online degrees to the platform, making a total of 10.

Among those degrees are a Master’s in Innovation and Entrepreneurship from HEC Paris; a Master of Public Health from the University of Michigan; a Global Master of Public Health from Imperial College London; and the flagship online MBA offering—the iMBA from the University of Illinois.

The first graduating class from the University of Illinois’ iMBA did so in November 2017. In two years, Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda explains, the program went from nothing to over 1,000 students.

“It was so successful that they shut down their EMBA and rolled it into the online MBA program. It’s time to move degrees online,” he asserts.

Does the growth of fully-online degrees highlight a shift in the way we receive...