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Online education company offers free online courses to universities across the world

As cases of coronavirus continue to spike globally, online education technology company Coursera is set to offer free online courses to universities. Jeff Maggioncalda, Coursera CEO, joins Yahoo Finance’s On The Move panel to discuss.

Video Transcript

- A lot of discussion about staying at home, and taking courses, and getting educated. This is nothing new. Back in 2012, Coursera was founded. And last year, 47 million people took advantage of some of those free online courses, but that number, as you can imagine, is skyrocketing right now.

Jeff Maggioncalda is the CEO of Coursera. He joins us now. Obviously, coronavirus, people staying in is driving the numbers. Do you think we would ever go back, or do you think this is a trend to go forward?

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JEFF MAGGIONCALDA: I think there's already been a trend going forward, but I think this forced experimentation, where literally, 1.5 billion students around the world-- this is nine out of every 10 students in the world according to Ernesto. --cannot go to school. So we're seeing a huge acceleration of something that's already been happening, which is a movement more towards online education. And I think when things get to a new normal, certainly, people go back to school, but it'll never be the same.

- I believe we have Akiko Fujita. We're going to try and get her re-dialed in, but let me ask. When you talk about the increase that we're seeing, the majority of courses are free. But there are also courses, if you're going to get a certificate, that you pay for. How does that work, or is that being waived in this crisis environment?

JEFF MAGGIONCALDA: Well, for consumers, any of the 4,000 courses on Coursera, you can take for free. You can watch all the lecture videos. And these are from some of the top universities and some of the leading companies, like Google, IBM, Amazon, and others. But if you want to get the certificate, then you pay a small fee for that. It's about $49.

Now we have courses. We have specializations. We even have from our university partners full master's degrees and bachelor's degrees. So there are thousands of students actually earning their degrees. These are identical to on campus degrees, but you can do them online. And we're seeing pretty much spikes in demand across the board.

- In fact, one of the big courses you're seeing is science matters. Oh, there's Akiko. Akiko, jump in here.

AKIKO FUJITA: Hey, Jeff. Can you hear me OK?

JEFF MAGGIONCALDA: I can hear you great, Akiko.

AKIKO FUJITA: Great, good to talk to you again. One of the things that struck me is prior to this outbreak, you had mentioned that a lot of these universities invested roughly 5%, some less than that on online education. Coursera has kind of followed the course of this outbreak, first, helping universities in China, now Europe, and now here in the US. How have you seen that balance tip, do you think?

JEFF MAGGIONCALDA: Well, you know, what's basically happening is we launched-- after doing direct to consumers, which was where we started in 2012, and a lot of people know Coursera as the place where individuals can go. We launched Coursera for business about four years ago to help businesses upscale employees. Coursera for governments, about three years ago to help governments up skill unemployed citizens. And then in Q4, we launched Coursera for campus.

This is a version of Coursera specifically for colleges and universities, who need to move to teaching online. Because of coronavirus, we've been offering Coursera for campus for free. It's impacted universities, and we've really seen demand follow school closures pretty much. So when students go home, when campus is shut down, more and more people will go online to do their learning.

So it's really nice to be able to help out in this way. We've seen 17,000 inquiries from colleges and universities around the world. And we've already activated over 2,000 universities with online learning, who otherwise might have taken years to get here.

AKIKO FUJITA: In addition to working with universities, I know you work closely with companies for upskilling. And you know, you mentioned that you think there's going to be this huge shift just like online learning to remote working. And that even in the first few weeks, you've seen a huge shift in Coursera in your internal operations. How permanent do you think this change is, and what does this say about the future of our workspace?

JEFF MAGGIONCALDA: Yeah, I think that many companies, just like schools have not been used to teaching online, and they've been sometimes a little bit resistant to move in that direction despite the trends. They've been forced to teach online. I think similarly, many companies have been resistant to allowing workers to work from home.

But now, they're being forced to do that, because three out of every four Americans are under stay at home policies. What we're learning is that working remotely is very different today than even five years ago. With laptops, webcams, video conferencing, like with Zoom, and then Google Docs, these collaborative cloud based docs, where people can work together online, it allows for a level of collaboration we haven't seen.

And I think that when the dust settles, and when we return to a new normal, not every job, but many, many jobs can be done effectively from home. So I think that we're going to have-- just like we have blended classrooms in the schools, I think we're not blending workplaces, where many jobs happen in the office. Many jobs happen remotely, and companies more and more will go towards a global workforce. Because more and more jobs can be done from remote locations.

- All right, Jeff Maggioncalda is the CEO from Coursera. Thank you very much for being here.