Exploring Coursera for Campus

At my university in Ecuador, we have a collaboration with Coursera for faculty and students.

The program for faculty gives faculty a Coursera license for one semester to take courses and get certificates for their professional development.

The program for students and faculty facilitates embedding of a Coursera course into a university course. All students are required to get the certification for the course that forms part of their class, and they also get a full license for the semester, so they can take additional courses in Coursera and get additional certifications.

During Fall 2023, I signed up for the “Coursera for your professional development” program. I took the following courses: “Leading for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education”, “Off the Clock: The Many Faces of Time”, “Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT”, “ChatGPT Advanced Data Analysis”, “Trustworthy Generative AI”, and started “Designing the Future of Work”.

As I found the courses interesting and well-designed, I decided to take it a step further and sign up for “Coursera for Campus” and use “Designing the Future of Work” as part of my Bridge Design class. One of the topics of this class is already related to the future of bridge engineering, so I expect that thinking broader about future thinking and design thinking is a great fit for this class.

In practice, it means that all students have to follow the Coursera course as part of my class, and their Coursera grade will count for 15% of their grade. They will also need to submit their final assignment of Coursera to me. In their project about the future of bridge engineering, they are also asked to reflect on what they learned in the Coursera course in proposing a business solution for cutting-edge bridge engineering technologies for Ecuador.

I’m curious to see how this experiment will go, and if my students will also take additional courses on Coursera.