Analysing Coursera: global growth, university dynamics and the road ahead
In a recent article on the growing interest in lifelong learning, I highlighted how universities face challenges not just from each other, but from a range of other providers offering online courses. One of the biggest of these, and arguably the most prominent online education company in the world, is Coursera. In this article, I take a closer look at Coursera’s evolution, partnerships, product focus, and some of the challenges it may face in the years ahead.
Coursera occupies an interesting space. On the one hand, universities partner with it to deliver courses; on the other, it is clearly an alternative study destination to enrolling directly with a university. Since its inception in 2012, the company has steadily diversified its partnerships, moving from an early emphasis on universities to a broader mix that now includes industry partners, enterprise customers, and its own content.
Coursera’s global reach has also expanded significantly. In its second quarter 2025 results, the company reported a whopping 183 million registered learners, adding around seven million each quarter. Learners are widely distributed, with the largest share in Asia Pacific (56.4M), followed by North America (35.8M) and Latin America and the Caribbean (27.8M). The UK accounts for 4.3 million learners.
Coursera notes that “registered learners” are simply unique email accounts and not a measure of active engagement. Even so, the scale and spread of registrations reflect the appeal of its expanding portfolio and underline its position as a global learning platform. To understand how Coursera has reached this position, it’s worth looking at how the company has evolved since its launch in 2012.
How Coursera has evolved since 2012
The company has evolved significantly since its launch in 2012. In its early days, Coursera was positioned as a vehicle to provide access to courses from the world’s leading universities, echoing the wider cultural narrative that the internet could widen access to knowledge in ways that had not previously been possible. In a 2012 interview, one of Coursera’s founders, Daphne Koller, encapsulated this message when she said:
“Students in the general public have a tremendous opportunity to be exposed to knowledge that has, until now, only been available to a tiny sliver of the world’s population.”
These platforms weren’t only unlocking the door to knowledge, they were also unlocking access to some of the most prestigious universities in the world. Given that higher education is both a deeply brand-tiered domain within the sector and in the wider public psyche, this message resonated. In the UK, Coursera was especially selective, with early partners including higher-ranked institutions such as the University of Edinburgh and the University of Manchester.
However, companies like Coursera were never going to be open education’s big breakthrough, and criticisms of the company for not making content available under Creative Commons licensing surfaced early on. It would be easy to play the classic higher education card here and portray this as the private sector’s profit motive quashing altruism and access.
Fundamentally, if you are going to offer something that entails remunerating people for developing and running courses for free, the cost has to be borne somewhere. I don’t think universities themselves saw this as a deliberate new strategic direction to underwrite free short online courses for the masses.
The search for a viable business model was one of the most talked-about topics of the 2010s for companies like Coursera, and this, combined with wider economic shifts, influenced the company’s evolution. That evolution has resulted in changes around product, portfolio and pricing, as well as in the partnership dynamic between the company and universities.
Coursera’s partnerships and market positioning
What became increasingly evident as profitability became a critical priority was the incompatibility of building a financially viable portfolio solely through university partners.
Universities largely offer courses across a wide range of subjects, they do not operate as commercial businesses, and, as someone recently put it, “university finance is built upon a complex edifice of cross-subsidies”. That reality does not create the strongest conditions for developing courses where demand is sufficient to make them viable, or for tracking income and expenditure at the level of a single course. Nor is it clear that universities can always move quickly enough to develop new courses in response to emerging needs.
Throughout Coursera’s evolution, what has become clear is a progressively more curated portfolio, increasingly aligned with the jobs market and career progression. Coursera has also been something of a catalyst for alternative education brands in the form of large companies. Courses and certificates from Google, Meta, Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, Unilever, Amazon and others are now more prominent on Coursera than any university offering. In today’s climate, where the utility of education for careers and employment is an increasingly dominant theme, it is clear that even the most prestigious universities may struggle to compete with the value proposition of these companies’ credentials.
This shift towards a portfolio focused on careers and employment presents a fundamental challenge for universities, both in being desirable partners that can align with this shift and in facing the competition Coursera presents as an alternative study destination. Over the past decade, most have not shown the agility or commercial focus needed to align with Coursera’s evolution and goals. The Coursera of today, as reported by Dhawal Shah, now has more non-university than university courses on its platform. Staggeringly, one course, Google’s AI Essentials, has attracted more enrolments than all university courses combined.
Coursera’s partnerships with UK universities
The product category where university courses now seem to feature most prominently is, unsurprisingly, degrees. But there has been a clear change over the years from Coursera simply partnering with a number of prestigious UK universities to working with those more willing to align with its strategic direction.
Looking at the current list of UK university partners, it’s not clear the extent to which long-standing Russell Group partners such as Edinburgh, Manchester, Imperial and Queen Mary, some of which have never offered degrees on the platform, are really putting much effort into this partnership anymore. None of these universities currently offer degrees, and it is not clear that there is any real investment being put into their short-course portfolios on the platform.
The University of London continues to be the most visible UK university partner, with most degrees on the platform. More recently, partnerships with Leeds, Huddersfield and Heriot-Watt University have resulted in a small number of degrees aligned with the company’s strategy. These are affordably priced, offer performance-based routes in, and focus on higher-demand areas.
A further set of universities are more aligned with Coursera’s heavy focus on expanding its AI course portfolio, with the University of Glasgow, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, and its newest UK partner, the University of the Arts London, all offering courses in this area. AI has been a key area of demand and focus for the company in recent years, and recently Coursera reported an average of 13 enrolments per minute for AI-focused content.
Having worked in this space for many years now, I find it fascinating to juxtapose these newer partnerships, delivering courses closely aligned with the company’s strategy, with the MOOCs developed by universities in the 2010s.
The balance of power feels very different. Back then, platforms relied on university brands to build their portfolios. Now, universities arguably need Coursera more than Coursera needs universities, giving the company much stronger influence over which courses are developed and considered
Gone are the days of the passionate academic burrowing away on a course on the History of Shoelaces. Today, universities need to present themselves as valuable partners, largely willing to align with Coursera’s portfolio and product demands if they want to be included.
Coursera’s product strategy: from courses to career pathways
Over the years, companies like Coursera have experimented with a range of course products under different names, including edX’s MicroMasters, FutureLearn’s ExpertTracks, and Coursera’s MasterTracks. They also incorporated existing products such as degrees throughout the 2010s. In recent years, as some of those experiments have fallen away, the focus has consolidated somewhat around three core products: short courses, certificates, and degrees.
While the number of short courses and degrees on Coursera grew during the 2010s, professional certificates have been the real story in recent years, aligning with a strategy focused squarely on industry and career outcomes. University Certificates, launched in the early 2020s, still feature on the platform, but it is the professional certificates offered in partnership with leading companies that have taken centre stage. This is literally the case on Coursera’s homepage, where company-branded certificates dominate the prime real estate, with universities less visible. The site itself is now structured around career-based discovery, with only a handful of recommended job-aligned courses coming from universities.
Although new university partnerships are still being established, Coursera’s own reporting increasingly emphasises company partners and their contribution to the growing catalogue of professional certificates. These are mapped to jobs and career stages, aimed at learners who want to enter, progress, or advance in their careers. That direction was further cemented with the announcement of the enterprise-focused Skills Tracks at Coursera’s recent annual event, Coursera Connect.
In a recent webinar with new-ish CEO Greg Hart and CPO Patrick Supanc, it was clear there will be further product developments in the years ahead, rather than consolidation. The broad direction they described is content becoming more modular and granular, mapped down to specific skills and tasks under the umbrella of what Coursera calls its skills graph, built on labour market intelligence and data.
In essence, Coursera is moving toward a competency-based education model in which the unit of organisation is not a degree title like “business management” or “data science” but the job role itself. Skills, knowledge, and assessments are mapped directly to the realities of that role. This approach allows Coursera to build a portfolio that serves both enterprise customers, who want to equip their workforce, and individual learners, who are seeking to enter, progress, or advance in their careers.
AI and Coursera’s evolving learning experience
Alongside these shifts in product strategy, Coursera has also been evolving the learning experience itself. The company is all in on AI, and artificial intelligence has driven much of its product development in this area. A key strand has been using AI to expand global reach and appeal, particularly through AI-powered translation and dubbing. Combined with a geopricing strategy, this further cements Coursera’s position as a global learning platform.
Beyond this, they have incorporated AI features relatively idiomatically, for example an AI tutor called Coursera Coach and Course Builder, a course authoring tool. These have since been expanded through the use of AI within courses, with features focused on dialogue, role play and simulation with AI personas, as well as in assessments.
Yet alongside these more positive uses of AI, my sense is that Coursera is also increasingly acknowledging the challenges AI poses to the credibility of courses and assessments, both in demonstrating learners’ competencies and in how employers may perceive them. Recent announcements have emphasised measures such as proctoring and locked browsers, and Coursera has highlighted that 15,000 proctored exams have been taken since May 2025.
The road ahead: challenges and opportunities for Coursera
There is a lot to be impressed by when it comes to Coursera. The company has grown substantially in learner numbers, revenue, global reach, and the size of its portfolio. It has vastly outstripped most of the competition that emerged at the same time. Its financial position is strong, with improving profitability metrics, growing revenue and, as of Q2 2025, a tidy $775 million in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments. Added to that, unlike some of its peers, Coursera appears to have greater clarity of direction.
But I do see challenges ahead. A more granular, competency-based model organised around job roles is a strong proposition that can resonate with both enterprise customers and individual learners, and is aligned with broader trends in workforce change and disruption. Yet it also places greater pressure on execution.
Offering a degree or short course mainly requires delivering a solid learning experience and supporting learners through to completion. The accountability for how that qualification is later valued in the labour market is more indirect. In contrast, a job-role-centred, competency-based approach demands much more. It requires that skills are accurately mapped to roles, that learning experiences genuinely build those skills (and are not simply “a course”), that assessments are credible and robust, and that the outcomes are demonstrable in workplace performance.
From a sales perspective, this approach is compelling because it speaks directly to employer needs and individual career aspirations. But it also heightens Coursera’s accountability for impact. This is why I think we will see a greater emphasis on academic integrity. Western Governors University, a leading competency-based institution, has a disaggregated faculty model with hundreds of staff focused solely on assessment and evaluation. That level of investment shows how central credibility in assessment is to sustaining a competency-based model.
For Coursera, the challenge is one of credibility, not just growing learner numbers, but proving that its courses and credentials translate into meaningful skills and workplace impact. Many of its metrics are positive and trending upwards, but this next phase magnifies the importance of execution. This is a journey that others are also looking to go on, and execution is not a simple equation of LMI + MCQ + NPS. And while the company’s credentials may succeed through their signalling value alone, particularly given the brands it has been drawing, the harder test will be whether they deliver demonstrable impact in the workplace. In an era where education is increasingly judged by its utility for work, Coursera’s stated ambition to be the global destination for discovering, mastering and verifying career-relevant skills may ultimately be measured against its ability to deliver on that promise.
