Coursera valued at $2.5B after a finance round of additional $130M

> $100+ million in revenues (and potentially over $200 million this year).

Are they profitable?

Not a huge fan of ads, but I would accept non-obtrusive ads in lieu of paying the certification fee if they wanted a traditional publisher revenue stream.

Thats what coursera-dl was for. Ive got 250GB of backed up courses from 2014-16 timeframe.

There is edX, although I haven't found their selection as good. It seems they rooted from academic courses to more like tech certificate type courses.

I feel the same way about udacity.

I just had a look at the courses that I completed and they are all still there, which courses were removed?

Why did they get rid of the courses?

I've taken a few courses on Coursera, including the deep learning specialization, and I thought the material was great. However, I noticed that in courses with ~5 hours of video, quizzes, and a project, the average completion times were measured in minutes. Based on this, I assume most people who received certificates cheated and didn't take the course, though I'm very much open to alternate hypotheses.

This is actually a rather interesting question because of second- and third-order effects.

Most people will tell you that a Coursera certificate is useless for getting a job, yet the folks at interviewing.io found it was very strongly correlated with interview performance [1]:

"For people who attended top schools, completing Udacity or Coursera courses didn’t appear to matter. However, for people who did not, the effect was huge, so huge, in fact, that it dominated the board. Moreover, interviewees who attended top schools performed significantly worse than interviewees who had not attended top schools but HAD taken a Udacity or Coursera course"

Why are recruiters ignoring such a strong signal?

My guess is that most people recognize how easy it is to cheat a Coursera course, so it is generally not considered valuable by recruiters. Therefore most job-seekers do not place any value on a certificate, so they will not be bothered to try to cheat to get one. So the only people remaining who complete the course are those that are doing it because they enjoy the subject matter, which is clearly associated with passing the interview. There is therefore a perverse feedback loop where any recognition of the high value of the course leads to cheating which causes it to become worthless (this reminds me a little of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle).

[1] http://blog.interviewing.io/lessons-from-3000-technical-inte...

I've never asked those I'm hiring, nobody ever brought it up. Ages ago I asked recruiters if they thought it mattered, they only care if the company does. No investor I've spoken to thinks the certs matter either. I'm like 0/60 with my population.

But, I do think the coursework is educational.

It's a bit chicken and an egg situation: if one has a degree, nobody ever asks about it except the very first job after graduation. So any course in addition to your normal degree will matter more because of what was learnt rather than the certificate at the end. Now for those without degrees taking coursera courses hoping they'll land a job,it may take more than just 2-3 courses, especially for the first job. Also,it depends a lot on the market: certain countries are obsessed with certifications and will be very happy if candidates can provide them,so cultural context can't be dismissed completely.

At some level nobody cares anymore where or how you studied. They are interested in what you can do. As in "What you can do for us in $field" And they mostly look at experience of what you have already done.

Did you learn it from books? Coursera? MIT? Less interesting than you did it here and this other place with this kind of success given the projects respective constraints. And that can often be a personal project.

Anyone getting too excited about the signalling value of the name on your school is looking at the wrong thing and might be a bit garbage to work for as well.

It's an unbelievably valuable resource to humanity.

I put a Coursera certificate on my resume - nobody ever mentioned it yet but I'm keeping it on there for now.

If referring to resumes, every company is different. A lot of places like to see continued training of any sort.

The majority of value comes in learning the material & being able to discuss related topics during interviews or while networking.

I, too, am curious about this. Not just Coursera but also LinkedIn Learning certificates, etc.

This isn't that I would avoid doing Coursera but it might mean I'd opt for other trainings offered. For example you can get AWS certified multiple ways, but the best way is prob through Amazon's AWS training.

A lot of companies value some sort of deliberate continuing education. I doubt that MOOC certificates are worth all that much--maybe with the exception of micro-master type of things from name institutions.

For me as an interviewer, Coursera certificate in a resume is a "that's what I've learnt, please talk to me about it" sign. Not more, not less.

Not much now. But I do think that this trend ("any company that accepts any of their certificates as valuable") will change in next years to come.

Not for hiring but signing off on taking time to self-improve. Rarer nowadays, but more common in bigco. (Training credits, ...)

Just like everything in tech, it comes down to what knowledge and skills you can demonstrate.

I believe post-secondary education offered both both in-person and with online options is commonly referred to as "college"

If you aren't seeking the higher expense full-blown 4 year experience, community colleges often are a decent route to explore.

I thought that was one of the features of Coursera. At least for some courses you join a cohort and all progress at the same pace: if you have questions you'll be asking them on the forums and getting answers from the same fellow students every week. Sometimes there's also peer grading where you review assignments for others.

Of course, they also try to make it so you can take the course at your own pace and for less popular courses there may be no one working through it at the same time as you. There's never going to be quite the same level of peer accountability/motivation as in an in-person class.

previous EdTech founder here. can only agree. It is a weird business. I think it boils down to this: most students don't care about learning. They educate themselves for other reasons.

So if you make a good learning tool, it only will be liked by the small niche of high performance self learners / students.

My experience is that even community college classes are 100x more rigorous than online classes through services like edx. And that's saying something, given how easy community college is.

I graduated from one of lowest ranked CS programs in the country, and even the easiest CS course I've ever taken was orders of magnitude more difficult than any of the dozen or so online certification courses I've gone through.

Until places like Coursera step up their game and start offering something like "honors" courses, where you're likely to fail if you don't do all of the course work, then I don't think they will ever meaningfully replace college degrees.

> Your online education product can be 10X better than a college course. It can costs 10X less.

Or 1,000x less in cost is probably more accurate.

I don't know what the current rates are (I never went to college) but Google says it's about $50,000 to get a CS degree if you live in the US.

But an online course might be $50 or $100.

I've had lots of folks who took my build a SAAS App with Flask course say they learned more about web development in my 10 hour course than their 4 year degree. Of course you learn different things during a CS degree, but it's interesting at how big of a gap there is in time vs money. 4 years and $50k vs a few days or weeks and $50.

What about the education market is suboptimal?

> Not even sure it is legal to require login for unsubscribing to a newsletter instead of providing me a magic link.

I had this problem with italki and solved it by asking for the email of their General Counsel and informing them that they were breaking the CAN SPAM act, which depending on interpretation requires either one click or two click unsubscribe but definitely doesn’t allow them to force you to log in.

Why is everything with B a bubble?

Its revenue went from $60M(2016) to $170M(2019) [1]. In 2019, it reported over 45 million learners on its platform. It is adding enterprise customers at a steady pace [2].

A conservative estimate of 250 million revenue in 2020 puts it at 10x revenue. This is pretty normal for a SAAS company that is growing 50% y/y.

1. https://www.classcentral.com/report/coursera-2019-year-revie... 2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2019/04/25/online-ed...

I'm extremely bullish on online learning. I owe my livelihood to things I learned online.

That said, after trying countless structured courses for a variety of subjects (ranging from design to music production), I've found that my best results are from coursed created by individuals, not large companies.

Individuals who deeply understand their core topic and are financially motivated to make the best possible course, I think, are the future of learning. Not "institutions" like Coursera.

I assume you came to this conclusion after thoroughly reviewing their internal metrics and financial statements?

If Coursera succeeds it'll be worth far more than 2.5B.

What valuation do you think would be fair?

> That being said, Coursera is doing a great service for humanity, and I hope they succeed.

Better than the Wikimedia Foundation? Last time I checked, they were asking for donations.

It may sound nice in theory but never works in practice. I've been doing Salesforce administration/development for about 5 years. They almost invented badge system followed by certification. On their trailhead platform,there are so many of those that it could take a couple of years to complete. They also have about 25 different certificates, varying from junior admin all the way to architect level. There are so many people out there who have 10-15 certs without even seeing the platform properly because they meemorised mock tests and etc. That's why interviewers rarely rely on certification and they are usually no more than a box ticking exercise.

Edit: Even though I'm sceptical about certificate value in recruitment process,I strongly recommend spending some time poking around Salesforce Trailhead website. They are pushing it very heavily, most collateral is very slick, a lot of PR explaining that people can go out and learn how to use it. Recently Microsoft started offering very similar platform by copying most of it. It's an excellent example how company attracts people to learn, as opposed to something like SAP,where you can't learn shit without having it at work.

I don't care if you followed a two month course by Joel Grus on Fizzbuzz and graduated magna cum laude. I care if you can actually code Fizzbuzz.

Coursera courses on your resume, is like listing your Microsoft Office skills. It would be noteworthy, if for some reason, you can't find your way around MS Office, or can't pick it up in a weekend.

LinkedIn already bought Lynda.com to create LinkedIn Learning. They've got no incentive to work with a competitor.

I had a much better experience with online classes with EdX with no mandatory peer discussion because it allowed me to maintain illusions about my fellow students. The courses where I had to do some peer grading were demoralizing because of the obvious plagiarism and low quality, very low quality, of the original work.

Some courses have peer feedback, but I have found it lacking. In the course I'm doing, peers are expected to assess 2 other peers as a minimum, and they do things like this:

- just enter a "." or "-" to get pass the restriction of having to submit _something_

- a peer wouldn't give me full marks for an assignment, but then not leave feedback as to why, usually just a "good job!"

This frustrates me to bits. Coursera could invest in some cleverer technology here, e.g. if it sees a peer deducts points, then if sentiment analysis on the related feedback is only positive, fail validation on the form.

I've ranted a tiny bit about this on one of my course notes blogs:

https://juanuys.com/blog/2020/07/14/introduction-to-game-des...

You can skip first step. Those certs are HR toilet paper. I used mine to placate my mum, she in turn rubbed Stanford/UM diplomas into our overly inquisitive aunts faces.

Myself and many people I know bootstrapped technical PhD (earning potential in postdoc = $45k) into data science/ML jobs (100k+) using Coursera, textbooks etc.

Care to recommend anything?

It wouldn’t make much sense. Coursera is a platform for other institutions to offer courses.

Can only comment on the first two. Coursera: most courses come from universities.They are structured,aims are clear. Depending on the level and the teacher,some can be dull or/and going 1000 miles an hour,so picking the right level is important. Udemy: less formal,less academic. Some courses are created by those who have no idea what they're talking about,while others are well prepared, broad,and deliver high value.

Content is always available. People pay for courses for it to be organized and given accompanying lectures and assignments.

I took 2 courses on Coursera a few years ago. They were anything but worthless certificates. Actually neither even offered certificates.

They were hard... Probably about as hard as the real course... Probably because they are real courses. I easily spent 100+ hours on each.

[Note: I'm enrolled in the MCS program at UIUC which makes extensive use of Coursera. Not a big fan of Coursera and most of the content for the courses is available through other avenues.]

They have two paths they can follow:

1) "Worthless" certificates

2) Platform to purvey certification for universities or other trusted credential organizations.

The certificates? They are what one makes of it. The problem of creating a usable, online education platform however is a hard problem and one worthy of investment. Academia is a tailspin trying to find an effective way to offer courses online.