The pandemic has changed the speed at which higher education is evolving and the role online education plays. Today, there is no question that world-class online degree programs offer a solution to so many of the challenges learners—and learning institutions—have been facing across the globe. Exacerbated by Covid, students are facing increased economic stress and uncertainty about their futures. They are seeking flexible learning experiences and credentials that are both valuable and affordable. Now is an ideal time for universities to develop and optimize their degree offerings for the expanded reach and impact that online programs can make possible.
If you’re currently considering, developing, or actively growing an online degree program, Coursera’s new Building Your Online Degree Programcan be your blueprint for delivering a world-class education to your learners online.
In 2016, Coursera launched its first online degree with the University of Illinois, opening new pathways to a high-quality credential. Since then, we’ve grown our portfolio to include 25 degrees from leading institutions in the US, UK, France, Russia, Colombia, and more—catering to the diverse needs of learners worldwide.
Advance your program with data-driven best practices
Building Your Online Degree Programis a definitive guide on how to create and scale a quality online degree program from scratch. The guide assimilates best practices informed by our own experience of onboarding world-class degrees and is enriched with insights from partner institutions that have seen success with their online degree programs.
Success begins with tough questions
Building a high-quality online degree begins with asking lots of questions. For example:
Why does the world need this degree?
What resources will be needed in order to be successful?
How will success be measured?
What is the optimal student journey?
The guide dives deeply into these questions and much more! We hope it becomes a trusted resource that you use, share, and return to as you develop and expand your online degrees.
A teacher in elementary school once assigned a “family crest” assignment. We were meant to explore websites such as Ancestry.com and find family crests associated with our last names. In the computer lab, I raised my hand. “I can’t find a family crest!” I am Korean-American … Other kids in the class raised their hands too — all of us were East or South Asian-American. It was an outdated assignment, one that wasn’t inclusive of the student body. I remember feeling ashamed and embarrassed because the solution my teacher gave us was to pick a random European name and do our project on that one. We felt alienated and embarrassed.
Probably one of the most outdated assignments I’ve experienced in my time in high school was not implemented in one class, but TWO. For my freshman year health class and my junior year Nutrition and Fitness class we were required to track all of our calories for the day for an entire week. Not just one meal here or there but every single thing including small snacks. The reason I think this is ridiculous is because in the time we live in with such a spotlight on social media the perception of one can be extremely warped. This kind of tracking can often lead to disordered eating and makes an unhealthy habit and relationship with food.
I think what makes the assignment dicey is that female students are assigned the role of ladies and male students of gentlemen. It’d make me very uncomfortable if boys (who, in my class, would probably revel in it) asserted dominance and found some sort of identity in that. And, if girls found an identity in subservience. Instead, if roles weren’t strictly reserved for respective genders, the lesson might have less of a backfiring, more of an objective viewpoint for students, and might foster much-needed empathy.
In my school, assignments are many times pre-written in the textbooks, so the teacher doesn’t usually create her own. But we do have role-plays and teams are asked to assign their own roles. I was leading a team once, and there was the character of a lower-caste servant in our play. I didn’t foresee it before it happened, but the students from upper-class, upper-caste and lighter-skinned families mockingly and casually threw those who weren’t as rich and privileged into those categories. It was gut-wrenching. It was especially uncomfortable because caste discrimination is an extremely sensitive topic in India, debated on national television almost every other day, caste-based violence always on the surface, and yet here I was seeing it happen among future nation-builders.
In 7th grade English, my teacher wished to do an experiment to see how we would have acted in the Holocaust; one third of us were assigned as the “pink,” one third as the “grey,” and the final third as the “blue.” Pink was deemed the “Nazis’‘ of the experiment, Grey was assigned as a “Jew,” and the final blue group was assigned to be the “spectators.” While the experiment was intended to teach us about the issues of being a bystander during the Holocaust, it came across as tone deaf and left several of the more insensitive students with the idea that it was okay to make jokes about events like the Holocaust. While it’s never a teacher’s intention to further marginalize already marginalized communities, experiments such as the “Rules for Chivalry” and my 7th grade Holocaust re-enactment do more harm than good.
While I’ve never participated in an activity at school that has made me uncomfortable, I can clearly see the immoral applications of this assignment. They were most definitely justified in canceling the assignment. The chances of this backfiring are highly likely. Much like the unexpected results of the Stanford Prison experiment, where college students conformed uncontrollably to roles as prison guards and inmates to the point of abuse, students learning about misogyny are susceptible to conform to the assigned roles too closely when given the right environment. While students may come to the conclusion that these sexist behaviors were in fact the antithesis of chivalry, the risk of social conformity suggests an alternative to teaching the concept. I believe the teacher should simply open the topic up to debate to get the students to understand different perspectives on the codes of chivalry from each other.
When we were studying the civil war in fifth grade, my teacher gave us a scenario, so that we could “sympathize” with Robert E Lee. She asked us to imagine that we disagreed with our families about the city budget. Would we support our families in protesting the budget, or would we stay at home because we liked the way the money was spent? She then asked us to pick a general, either Ulysses S. Grant, or Robert E. Lee, and choose which we thought was a better general, and then give them a letter grade for cleverness, bravery, etc. I was one of only a few kids who chose Ulysses S. Grant. Not because the others were somehow worse, but because Lee had been presented in the light of a hero just a few minutes before. My teacher compared the institution of slavery to a disagreement about the city budget, and convinced us that Robert E. Lee didn’t support slavery, and was just fighting in the Confederacy for his family. She solidified that idea with the activity, in which she asked kids to praise him. She sent most kids home that day with the notion that Lee was a “good man.” The curriculum surrounding Lee was changed a year or so later, but it had been setting ten-year-olds up to sympathize with the Confederacy for years before that.
“Covid-19 Devastated Many Communities. But Not Cherokee Nation.” is a five-minute film that touches on themes of community,history, leadership and justice. The Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma has kept its Covid-19 death rate lower than most American communities have — even though Native Americans are almost twice as likely to die from Covid-19 as white people are. In the video, The Times explores reasons for the Cherokees’ success — including strong leadership, a long history of being self-reliant when the federal government fails to provide support, and a commitment to putting community first.
One year ago this week, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic. What lessons can we learn from how Cherokee Nation handled Covid-19?
Students
1. Watch the short film above. While you watch, you might take notes using our Film Club Double-Entry Journal (PDF) to help you remember specific moments.
2. After watching, think about these questions:
What questions do you still have?
What connections can you make between this film and your own life or experience? Why? Does this film remind you of anything else you’ve read or seen? If so, how and why?
3. An additional challenge | Respond to the essential question at the top of this post: What can we learn from how Cherokee Nation has handled the coronavirus pandemic?
4. Next, join the conversation by clicking on the comment button and posting in the box that opens on the right. (Students 13 and older are invited to comment, although teachers of younger students are welcome to post what their students have to say.)
5. After you have posted, try reading back to see what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting another comment. Use the “Reply” button or the @ symbol to address that student directly.
• Read our list of practical teaching ideas, along with responses from students and teachers, for how you can use these documentaries in the classroom.
Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.
Last fall, when The New York Times Learning Network invited teenagers across the United States to tell us what living in a pandemic was like, we didn’t expect so many answers — nor did we expect those answers to take quite so many different forms.
Over 5,500 submissions flooded in: essays, photos, paintings, diary entries, poems, comics, rap lyrics, scrapbooks, letters, texts, podcasts, musical compositions, recipes and more.
It took months to choose from among them and create a collection that would tell a broad story, but still represent the key themes we kept seeing. That collection, Coming of Age, was published this week as a collaboration between The Learning Network and the Special Sections team at The Times.
I’m an editor with The Learning Network, a team that was formed in 1998 to help people teach and learn with Times journalism. We do that in many ways, but the most important thing we do is provide a place for teenagers to have their say. We moderate a lively comments section in which young people all over the world discuss current events, and we run nine contests a year that invite students to use The Times as a model to do things like write their own editorials and arts reviews, and create their own podcasts.
But last spring, as the coronavirus closed schools and canceled extracurricular events, we began hearing from teachers and students about the impact that upheaval and isolation was having on a generation of teenagers. We knew we needed to come up with something different.
At the time, historians and museums were encouraging us all to record our pandemic experiences and keep artifacts for posterity. Many teachers we work with were already asking students to write pandemic diaries. We wondered, what artifacts might teenagers be creating without realizing they were valuable? What if we could invite them to send us some of those items, and tell us why each was important to them? By the end of May, we had the basic idea for what we called our Coming of Age in 2020 Contest.
“I created scenes in my head until I found that a pen and paintbrush could do the same,” wrote Jada Murray, 16.Credit…Jayda Murray
Then came last summer’s protests. In our comments section, student after student talked about “waking up” to injustice, taking to the streets and paying attention to politics for the first time. Soon, what we thought of as a pandemic project had expanded, and we decided on something more open-ended that allowed students to respond to any big event they wanted to. We also decided that, rather than limiting them to one mode of expression — only photos, say — we would let them send us anything they could upload digitally, as long as it was appropriate for a family newspaper. (One forgets to remind teenagers of that at one’s peril, we’ve discovered.)
We did add one crucial requirement: an artist’s statement in which students had to tell us when, how and why they created their piece, and specifically how it linked to our theme of coming of age during a tumultuous time.
The contest closed in mid-November, just after the election. First we invited adults, including journalists from the Times newsroom, to read through the entries. Next, we sent the work to teenage judges who had won previous Learning Network contests, who then surfaced pieces that we adults might have overlooked. By the end of the process, we had 245 finalists, any of which would have merited entry in the final collection. That was when we turned to our partners in Special Sections to make it all coherent.
OurLearning Network team usually works in a way that is fairly isolated from the rest of the newsroom, as we produce curriculum, not journalism. For this project, though, we had the privilege of watching professional news editors and designers turn our work into something Times readers of any age might enjoy.
Our goal together was to tell the richest, most representative story possible. We wanted to honor the emotions that came up over and over — the loneliness, boredom and depression; the changing relationships with parents, siblings and friends; the numbing days of Zoom-school; and the near-universal desire to find meaning in all of this. But we also wanted to feature kids from different regions of the country and diverse backgrounds. In the end, the Special Sections team chose 35 pieces to tell the story in a way that “found the right balance, and gave equal weight to all the voices,” said Corinne Myller, the art director for Special Sections.
The best part of all of this is seeing the finished project out in the world. Since the digital version was published Monday, we’ve received excited, all-caps messages from teenage artists. We can’t wait to see where teachers take it next.
This map shows the land that was newly developed in the continental United States from 2008 to 2019. The development may be for public or private uses — homes, commercial or industrial buildings, recreational facilities, or public buildings. Data was derived by a computer model using satellite imagery.
After looking closely at the map above (or at this full-size image), answer these four questions:
What do you notice?
What do you wonder?
The questions are intended to build on one another, so try to answer them in order.
2. Next, join the conversation online by clicking on the comment button and posting in the box. (Teachers of students younger than 13 are welcome to post their students’ responses.)
3. Below the response box, there is an option for students to click on “Email me when my comment is published.” This sends the link to their response which they can share with their teacher.
4. After you have posted, read what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting a comment. Use the “Reply” button to address that student directly.
On Wednesday, March 17, teachers from our collaborator, the American Statistical Association, will facilitate this discussion from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern time.
5. By Friday morning, March 19, we will reveal more information about the map, including a free link to the article that included this map, at the bottom of this post. We encourage you to post additional comments based on the article, possibly using statistical terms defined in the Stat Nuggets.
Reveal
We’ll post more information here on Thursday afternoon. Stay tuned!
• Learn more about the “Notice and Wonder” teaching strategy and how and why other teachers are using this feature from our on-demand webinar.
• Sign up for our free weekly Learning Network newsletter so you never miss a graph. Graphs are always released by the Friday before the Wednesday live-moderation to give teachers time to plan ahead.
Students 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
Use your imagination to write the opening of a short story or poem inspired by this illustration — or tell us about a memory from your own life that this image makes you think of.
Post it in the comments, then read the related article to learn more.
Students 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
By Betty Vandenbosch, Chief Content Officer at Coursera
The pandemic has accelerated the rate at which universities worldwide are investing in online learning. To meet learner demand and changing expectations, your institution might be deciding with a renewed conviction to bring some of your most valued credentials online — your degree programs.
Universities now have many paths and potential partners to help launch online degrees. Coursera is fortunate to be a choice for many top institutions. However, every university has to decide who to partner with based on factors that align with their goals and mission. During my time as the chancellor of Purdue University Global, and since I’ve been at Coursera, the choices available and the selection criteria have become increasingly clear to me. I’d like to share what I have learned.
While it might seem that the first decision is whether or not to partner, you might be able to make that decision more astutely once you determine which partner would be best for your needs. You can use the following framework to help find the best partner to launch your first online degree or expand your portfolio.
Factors to consider:
Goal
Critical questions
Implications
Reach and Student Characteristics
Which demographic would you like to serve?
Would you like to reach new student profiles, such as working professionals?
Is your priority reaching students in new or existing geographies?
Select a partner who can best help you reach your ideal students.
Consider if you’d like to offer performance-based or other novel approaches to admissions to reach a new profile of students.
Scale
How many students do you hope to enroll per cohort?
How many cohorts do you plan to start each academic year?
Do you or your partner have the capacity to develop and grade up to several hundred assessments per course per term?
How can your partner help reduce technical DevOps or software costs for your degree?
Ensure your partner has a proven track record of filing and serving cohorts at your target size.
Carefully review partner’s technical tools for teaching and assessing at scale.
Understand software costs associated with delivering your degree programs.
Content Development and Production
What is your partner’s instructional design capability, and what level of support will faculty members receive (and require)?
How will and can your partner support hands-on learning?
Do you want to use your existing online courses as open content leading into your degree program?
Before developing your online degree, you must fully understand your partner’s support level and who will own and support the content.
Integrating open content that anyone can take before applying to a degree program can help broaden the applicant pool, build confidence in prospective students, and develop multiple revenue streams.
Innovation and Technology
What data, tools, and analytics will you have access to?
How advanced are your partner’s tech stack, uptime, and reliability?
How robust are features to prevent plagiarism, offer reliable proctoring, and conduct high-stakes assessments?
Does your partner have the financial stability to invest in long-term R&D, leading to new or improved features?
Data can inform your pedagogical choices, while reliable technology ensures assignment submissions won’t go down at a crucial time.
Upholding academic integrity increases the value of your degree programs and your university’s overall brand.
Online learning is rapidly evolving. A strong learning experience will determine student satisfaction, cohort growth, and retention.
Cost Transparency
Is the cost structure clear for both you and your partner?
Who pays for any upfront program costs?
How long will the contract be?
The long-term economic viability of your program depends on a transparent cost structure.
Student Services and Marketing
Do you prefer to co-manage online student services or outsource?
Do you or your partner have sophisticated technology for student support and retention services?
How much do you want to spend on marketing?
How confident are you in your partner’s marketing?
Having a clear understanding of how your partner interfaces with students is critical to building lifelong relationships.
Take marketing costs into consideration as you determine the accessibility and affordability of your degree programs.
Retention Rate
What is the retention rate of other programs the potential partner supports?
How has your partner’s degree portfolio expanded over time?
Determine the value and investment the potential partner places on building durable partnerships.
While your institution may have other unique factors to consider, I hope this framework provides a useful starting point. The decisions you make early on are critical to the long-term success of your online degree programs. You want to select a partner who will work with you to advance your mission, best serve your students, and help you build lifelong learning relationships.
Today, we’re excited to launch three new Professional Certificates from Google in the growing fields of Data Analytics, Project Management, and User Experience (UX) Design. They are designed to prepare learners for an entry-level role in under six months. The certificates don’t have any prerequisites.
When many people have been forced to reassess their work prospects, the certificates can offer stepping stones to well-paying careers. They will serve a broad range of learners: new grads landing their first job, front-line workers seeking stable employment, mid-career professionals making a pivot, or parents planning their return to the workforce. Each certificate is completely online, self-paced, and costs $39 per month.
Data Analytics Professional Certificate – In the U.S., there are nearly 15,000 open entry-level data analytics roles, with an annual median entry-level salary of more than $63,000. This seven-course certificate explores analytical skills, concepts, and tools used in many introductory data analytics roles – including SQL, Tableau, RStudio, and Kaggle.
Project Management Professional Certificate – Employers will need to fill nearly 2.2 million new project-oriented roles each year through 2027, according to the Project Management Institute. This six-course certificate prepares learners to launch a project management career. It covers industry-standard tools and methods, including the agile project management system, and key soft skills, such as stakeholder management, problem-solving, and influencing.
User Experience (UX) Design Professional Certificate – UX design jobs are projected to steadily grow over the coming years, with median salaries for an entry-level role around $82,000. This seven-course certificate explores UX principles, UX terms, and industry-standard tools, including Figma and Adobe XD. By the time they complete the program, learners will have three portfolio projects to use in their job applications.
Each certificate includes resources to help learners enhance their resumes and prepare for interviews. Upon completion, learners can share their information with 100+ partners committed to sourcing talent from Google certificate programs, including Deloitte, Anthem, Verizon, Snap Inc, and other top brands. Google is also launching apprenticeships in the certificate fields of data analytics, project management, and UX design, with applications opening in April. To make the new programs more accessible, Google is offering 200,000 scholarships to learners across the U.S., Europe, Middle East, and Africa.
The new certificates further expand the catalog of career-focused Google content on Coursera, including the previously launched Google IT Support Certificate, which has helped connect thousands of learners with in-demand IT skills. With an expanding selection of job-relevant certificates, Google and Coursera are proud to act on a shared commitment to helping learners around the world develop the necessary skills to enter growing fields.
“My name is Sylvia Kaur. I’m a Project and Programme Manager and I have worked for companies both in the UK and the Middle East.”
How did you learn about Alison?
When I first moved to the Middle East, I had a job in which I needed to know about sales, marketing and the financial functions of a business. I did a search on Google for courses relating to these and found Alison.
What was your first course on Alison, and why did you choose it?
I have done many, but I believe my first course was the Diploma in Sales Management. I chose it because of my new job and also because I’m very entrepreneurial. My goal is to start my own business.
How have Alison courses affected your career?
The knowledge I’ve gained from Alison courses has helped me in different aspects of my career. My knowledge of finance, sales, Human Resources and business in general needed to be improved and Alison has helped me gain new skills. These have been invaluable in helping me to carry out my work effectively. The soft skills courses have also helped to mould me into more of a professional.
What’s your favourite way to relax from studying?
Sitting and having tea in a nice hotel or cafe.
Where are you working and what are you studying now?
I am currently a Project Manager and I am studying an MBA at university part-time.
What’s next for you, in terms of education or work?
I am looking to gain more experience in my field and to hopefully start my own business one day.
If you could learn absolutely anything in the world from an Alison course, what would it be?
Probably how to effectively expand a company globally.
What would you say to someone if they asked you about Alison? Would you recommend it and why?
I would recommend Alison to anyone. The fact that Alison offers courses in so many different professions and business functions for free is amazing.
By signing up for Codecademy for Teams, you already put one of the hardest parts of learning to code behind you — getting started. But if you need a little extra motivation, here’s a tip: stay focused on the benefits that’ll come from from what you’re learning, like career advancement or more exciting projects.
Need a little inspiration? Six learners share what they experienced as a result of upskilling with Codecademy.
“I can have better conversations with developers now.”
If you’re in a non-technical role, learning a programming language means you’re able to speak the same language as the engineers, developers, or customers you’re working with. Less gets lost in translation, which makes it easier for everyone to stay on the same page as far as expectations and timelines.
Take it from Johnnie, Business Intelligence (BI) Team Lead at The Motley Fool, who completed the Python course:
“This has been the first time I’ve been able to successfully retain Python. I can remember the syntax now, I can remember the functions now. It hammered it into my head better than any other times I tried to learn it with videos or books. I’m more confident and I feel more understanding of our devs. I can have better, more contextual conversations with them now.”
When you know the technical lingo and have a basic understanding of how products are built, it leads to more natural conversations with those in other functions, which — you never know — could spark the next big idea at your company. Calli Bonnet, a Product Manager at Paradox shares:
“I love getting the opportunity to chat with other people who are doing similar things and bounce ideas off each other. When we talk about a product or requirements, we’re all talking the same language now.”
New tools pop up all the time and you can never be sure which one your team may adopt or which one a future employer may prefer. Keeping up with technology trends is the way of work these days, so the more knowledge you have, the better. It’s this idea that motivates Gary Taylor, BI Analyst at The Motley Fool, to keep learning:
“For me, it was expanding my toolbox. When you look at the tool set that gets used in data science a lot, Python is way up there. Your critical data analysis tools — like Django, NumPy, or pandas — are all derived from Python.”
“The products I manage are shipped at higher quality.”
By understanding how code works, you’re able to think through the technical requirements of building a product, adding a feature, or fulfilling a customer request. This helps you more accurately gauge what’s possible — and what’s not — given your resources, ultimately resulting in better products. As Product Director at Paradox, Jessica Sarceda experiences this:
“I am in a very strategic and product heavy role, and through learning with Codecademy (SQL in particular), I can now better communicate with clients on their reporting requests, speaking to what’s realistic technically and map those reporting needs to engineering. I have found that the more I can technically understand the scope of products I manage, the more likely the product is to be shipped at high quality.”
“We’re getting opportunities to work on bigger projects.”
When you know how a product works inside and out, it shows. And when leadership picks up on this, they’ll be more likely to trust you with bigger, more strategic projects. This was the case for a group of product managers at Paradox who learned to code together. Calli from the team shares:
“We’re getting the opportunity to work on more strategic initiatives that involve looking at our database, looking at the data we have, and thinking about how we can potentially restructure it. I don’t know that leadership would give us that opportunity if we didn’t have a basic understanding of how the product works, what’s possible, and what’s not possible. We’re getting more opportunities, bigger opportunities as product people.”
“I felt stuck in my day-to-day tasks. Now I have some independence.”
Getting through your work becomes a lot easier when you don’t have to rely on others for their technical skills or knowledge. Not to mention, it feels pretty empowering to be able to run with tasks on your own. This was the case for Marco De Libero, a senior BI analyst, who tells us:
“To perform very basic analyses, I needed to interrogate an old, slow, and basic software to retrieve my raw data in the first place. Furthermore, any advanced extraction needed a data engineer to do the job. I felt stuck in my day-to-day tasks. My wake-up call was when my data engineer co-worker suggested that I pick up some SQL skills to provide me with some independence when completing my tasks. I’ve built some exciting analyses that I could never have completed had I not started my coding journey with Codecademy.”
“My company recognized my growth.”
Climbing the corporate ladder is a thing of the past. Today, it’s way more common to dip your toes into new areas, try out different roles, and apply a mix of different skills at work. The result could be career advancement or work that’s more fulfilling, which was the case for Jorge Alejo at dataPlor. He explains:
“As I’ve developed more skills, I’ve created multiple, company-wide business intelligence dashboards, provided custom datasets for everyday operations, and assumed command of a variety of processes at the console level. My company has recognized my growth and I have since moved into data analytics for operations and business intelligence, which is now my main responsibility.”
Keep coding, keep growing
We know learning a new technical skill isn’t easy. But, as the learners above can tell you, it’s worth it. So, keep putting one foot in front of the other and don’t stop until you reach your goals.
Speaking of reaching your goals, what are you aiming to achieve by learning how to code? Let us know in the comments below! And if you’re still figuring out where to get started, we have some recommendations for courses based on your current team and role. Check them out here.
