With not even a handful of international university partners, Coursera has already attracted a strong global audience — when it announced it reached one million enrolled last month, it said 61 percent of those students students are outside the US.
But with its latest round of partners, the online education provider is further strengthening its international position.
On Wednesday, the company announced that it has added 17 new university partners — six of which are overseas — bringing its total number of academic partners to 33.
The new partners include Ivy League institutions, such as Brown and Columbia, as well as schools like the Berklee School of Music and Mount Sinai Medical School, which bring more diversity to the platform’s course offerings. International partners include the University of Melbourne, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. (See full list of schools below.)
Since officially launching the platform five months ago, the company has been on a tear, announcing new partners or milestones seemingly every month. But the company is still at work forging partnerships with more universities, constrained only by its own capacity to meet with interested schools and train faculty and staff, said co-founder Andrew Ng.
“I think we have a lot of ground left to cover, especially on the international side,” co-founder Daphne Koller told me. Nearly all of Coursera’s videos have been translated into more than 20 languages, but, for international students, the translated courses aren’t as helpful as classes actually taught in other languages could be. With the new partners, Coursera will be able to offer 200 courses across a range of disciplines – from music performance to medicine to math.
Coursera’s newest partners include:
Berklee College of Music
Brown
Columbia
Emory
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Mount Sinai School of Medicine
Ohio State
UC Irvine
University of British Columbia
University of Florida
University of London
University of Maryland
University of Melbourne
University of Pittsburgh
Vanderbilt
Wesleyan
