Will Coursera’s Recent $5.9B IPO Disrupt Traditional Education?
If you haven’t heard the news, Coursera went public on March 31st, 2021 “raising nearly $520 million at an implied $4.3 billion valuation and closing up 36%, giving Coursera a market cap of $5.9 billion at the end of its first day of trading” (Source: HolonIQ). What does this mean? How does this change the education landscape?
I don’t think anything will change. Coursera will still provide hundreds of thousands of hours of curated content from industry leaders and experts in the field in everything from Humanities to Computer Science. As a lifelong learner, I love the ability to have access to that wealth of information at any given moment.
Over the past year, I’ve spent time talking and interviewing many of my teacher friends and colleagues, asking them questions, and doing a bit of my research to determine the common teaching challenges in the current context. Many of the teachers’ challenges presented this past year are related to the overnight expectation to change the physical classroom into an online one. I have personally observed the struggles with my 8-year old son and his teachers. As a result, many teachers haven’t been able to adapt best practices to accommodate this change. Furthermore, many teachers have been reportedly teaching even more hours than usual (I’m not sure how this is possible as teachers already work 80+ hours a week). From what I understand, many educators have had to take on extra courses and subject areas they wouldn’t have had to in physical settings. So to break it down, about 1/3 of a teacher’s time is spent teaching, another 1/3 on grading, and the final 1/3 is on planning. (Please note: this is not at all accurate, but this is what most people breakdown think a teacher’s workload looks like, and for the sake of simplicity, we will assume there are only these three buckets even though there are many more). However, if teachers are now responsible for teaching 2 to 3 times more subjects, then the numbers I provided don’t quite add up. So we can ignore everything I just stated.
What you are probably wondering is what does all of this have to do with Coursera? Well, I think it’s time that teachers throw out all curriculum and lesson planning out the window and realize they live in a world that is abundant with content, pre-developed lesson plans and available resources that are free and open to use. Just employing this method alone would remove the “teaching” and the “planning,” leaving the grading and assessment, which in my opinion is what matters most. I know this sounds crazy but hear me out, and I’ll share a personal story with you.
When I was a Pre-Algebra teacher for grades 7 and 8 students (which still shocks me as I was terrible at math as a kid — that’s another story for another time), I was fortunate enough to teach math from a computer lab. Albeit, I shared the lab space with the entire school of 150+ staff and thousands of students, I made the most of it. I doubled down on Khan Academy and the digital resources provided through the textbook. I spent most of my time designing assessments connected with the real-world versus content and lesson plans that were already available at a high quality elsewhere. I essentially outsourced my teaching and planning at no cost. What ended up happening after employing this method was a happy accident. I now spent my time building relationships with my students instead of lecturing and acting like I was in a lead role in a poorly written play at the front of the classroom. I started learning about student interests, passions, and pains they faced both inside and outside school. It wasn’t all rainbows and puppies, though — not all students and parents felt this was the right way to “teach,” but I ignored all that and kept pushing forward. I began adding quality resources to supplement Khan Academy, which is when I found out about Coursera! Coursera was in its infancy, and I believe it was only a year old and didn’t have nearly enough content as it does now. However, I signed up immediately and still browse the catalogue when I need some inspiration or to learn more about another skill.
The move from a “subject matter expert” (SME) to a “learning expert” was a defining moment in my career as an educator and general professional. I got to experiment with how learners learn and what they wanted to know more about. I dared to deviate from the prescriptive curriculum roadmap and instead opted to improve on it.
As I taught other subjects in various environments over the years, I carried this experience with me which shifted my perspective on supporting students. I spent time building connections instead of overemphasizing the content. I coached instead of forcing irrelevant content down their throats, and I gave up on being the SME. I realized that I don’t have to know it all, but I had to learn how to be resourceful. Admitting that I didn’t know the answer made it easier to work with students and collaboratively figure out the solution. This shift in thinking created a classroom filled with mistakes and allowed me to make many of my own. However, I never lacked access to information, which was a powerful feeling that I could translate over to my students.
And guess what, this led me to develop an online course called News Media back in the day — one of the first online courses at the school (a mini Coursera, if you will). However, I curated content from multiple resources to teach students how to research and differentiate fake news (yes, even 7+ years ago — this was a thing) and become conscious consumers. The course itself took me all of 2 days to put together; I used creative commons and open source content and then hosted it on a learning management system (LMS) — Moodle. The classroom became filled with discussions about current events and loosely tied to the course outcomes, but students had the freedom to talk about whatever their hearts desired. News Media was the only course that I didn’t have a single complaint from the students, parents, or administration. Many parents praised me for getting their children to read more and ask more insightful questions about the world around them. The truth was it was the least amount of effort and the most significant value that I could provide to students. A year later, the course was modified and changed into a broader Multimedia program. However, I’m unsure what happened to it as I left the school to pursue another opportunity in another organization.
So what does Coursera’s IPO mean for traditional education? Coursera will continue to grow its network of educational content providers and course creators. I would encourage teachers to leverage this resource as an opportunity to relay content to the students and shift their teaching practice towards a context-driven environment focused on relationship building and the social-emotional well-being of their students.
Until next time, continue to work hard on yourself but don’t be hard on yourself!
Dr. Karim Waljee
The Conscious Edupreneur
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