Jeff Magioncalda, CEO of Coursera, the global online course provider, revealed that discussions were held with 6 Egyptian universities to help them develop advanced skills curricula to meet the needs of the labour market.
He revealed that the New Al-Alamein University signed a cooperation agreement with Coursera to be the first partner of the platform in Egypt. Ain Shams University will follow suit shortly.
Magioncalda told Daily News Egypt that Coursera cooperates with 175 major international universities, in addition to global technology companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft, to prepare the content of its training courses for their employees. He added that all the courses and programmes available on the Coursera platform were prepared by a specialized team.
The recent period witnessed a great demand for remote training after the Coronavirus pandemic and the imposition of quarantine procedures by the majority of the world’s countries, stressing that Coursera’s strategy is based on providing courses in 4 basic areas: business, technology, health, and data analysis.
He stressed that users of the platform in Egypt seek to learn business skills such as operations management, financial strategy preparation, Microsoft programmes, and digital marketing, in addition to computer science and software, as well as product design in the technology sector, in addition to the Internet of things technology and machine learning. and probabilistic statistics in the field of data science.
He added that 80% of the platform’s users globally confirmed that the courses helped them get good job opportunities, noting that Coursera also provides professional training certificates for students who did not obtain university degrees and learn through them the skills that help them find jobs that require specific skills in Information technology. For example, Google offers a certificate for information technology support and data analysis jobs, while IBM offers certificates to non-university students in the fields of information security and data management, and Amazon aims to focus on digital marketing activity.
He pointed out that 7 of them help non-university graduates to get an opportunity to join universities and obtain a scientific degree from them, indicating that the trainee who does not have a degree from the university can learn skills related to these digital jobs to work remotely and get a good salary.
On Coursera’s role in supporting the building of an Egyptian base of application developers and entrepreneurs, he indicated that the platform provides the “Nanodegree” program, which enables trainees to obtain a reliable and accredited certificate from international universities or from specialized international companies, noting that the company is fully aware of the importance of increasing skills. It provides professional courses for children and youth aimed at shedding light on the mechanisms of easy and safe access to information via the Internet and developing skills according to the requirements of future jobs.
He added that there are also Coursera labs, which allow the learner to use any Internet browser to download educational materials and software that help in the immediate learning process, explaining that the most popular courses on the platform are a course on how to use Google Sheet, and another about learning Microsoft Excel, and a third About the use of digital marketing through the application CAMD.
He pointed out that Coursera currently has partnership relations with more than 2,900 institutions around the world, to qualify its human resources in line with the rapid changes in the field of work and cooperation agreements with government agencies to train their employees, explaining that the platform has accredited educational programs in 3,000 universities, and signed recently, an agreement with the Moroccan government allows each university to use its available courses.
He pointed out that Coursera seeks to provide students with all digital skills according to the scientific disciplines and colleges they attend, and whenever the student succeeds in a job, he can obtain a certificate from the best international universities, considering that Egyptian cadres have competitive advantages in certain fields in the Middle East region, such as Mathematics, in addition to having a large advantage in the data analysis activity in the IT sector.
The CEO of Coursera International participated in a dialogue session entitled: “The Challenges of Future Jobs from a Global Perspective” on the sidelines of the activities of the Global Forum on Higher Education and Scientific Research, which was held in the New Administrative Capital from 8-11 December.
