Coursera Expands To Latin America In Big Ways

Fifteen million people have made a choice. They chose to learn and grow and expand and advance. They sat in their apartments in New York City or their flats in London or their huts in Colombia. They came to learn from the four corners of the world. They opened their computer screens or turned on their mobile devices. These 15 million people had two things in common.

They used Coursera.

Their lives improved.

Coursera is the world’s largest platform to offer open-access online courses. This means that anyone can take a class delivered by instructors and professors from the best Universities around the globe. Business, programming, public speaking, and so on.

Cool right? Yes, but as any good company knows, complacency kills. While English speakers from all over the world enjoyed this learning platform, there was a rising demand from one particular market that was not being met. The Spanish speakers of the world wanted more content. They wanted it in Spanish. They wanted more access. They wanted to be able to navigate a mobile app in their language. And “they” represented a whole lot of people. In 2013, almost 37 million people spoke spanish in the U.S. That makes the U.S. the fifth largest Spanish-speaking country in the world. In the world.

So, Coursera did what a thriving company should do. They listened, they hired talented people, and they built what their customers asked for.

What did they build? As of today, Coursera launched more than 100 new courses in Spanish from the some of the best Universities across Latin America. That is 10 times the amount of courses previously on the platform. They also have 60 courses that have been subtitled or fully translated in Spanish. A majority of these offerings are career-focused courses like business english, IOS development, data analytics, green marketing, and entrepreneurship. Oh, and the mobile app is now also available in Spanish, making it easier for its users to navigate. This makes them the first international Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) provider that provides a fully translated app for Android and iOS. They listened.

What team did they build? Coursera built a cross-functional team led by Stephanie Durand, from marketing, product, operations, and partnerships. In addition, a year ago they hired Giovanni Dubois, who leads University Partnerships in Latin America. He has built strong partnerships with the best universities in Mexico, Colombia, and Chile and has helped them create a strategy to built a strong Spanish course catalog from the best universities in the region. Giovanni was the previous CEO of the Bay Area’s largest professional Latino organization, “Latin America Media” (LAM). He started this company as student at UC Berkeley because he missed feeling connected to other Latinos as an engineering major. It started as a dinner, but then grew to a network of 11,000 people. He is a master organizer and giver. More than anything, he understands the Latino community and is passionate about these issues.

When I talked to him about this article, his enthusiasm was booming. He is excited about the immediate access and new opportunity each individual on the platform will be able to access. But most of all, he is inspired and driven by the social impact that these courses will have in both the U.S. and Latin America. He shared that Coursera currently has 1.5 million Spanish learners on the platform, but that number is growing. Not only are Spanish speakers coming to Coursera’s platform from every Latin American country, but from every corner of the globe. And a recent Harvard Business Review survey showed that half the people using Coursera are doing so to improve their professional life. Over 90% of these people using the platform are benefiting in ways they are seeking. In other words, millions of people from all over the world are creating skills and expertise in their areas of interest and now in their language. This simply did not exist at this level of accessibility ever before. This is why social impact is huge. This is why Coursera has created a global name.

But that is no surprise. Coursera has partnered with key partners like Universidad de los Andes, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Tec de Monterrey, and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile to deliver world-class training to Latin America, and Spanish-speaking learners in general.

But don’t believe me. Here are a few quick stories. Francisco is from Spain. He was stressed out as a Technical Manager for a distribution company in Spain, so he signed up for an online course in web development at a local university. But he was thoroughly disappointed in the quality of education. So he searched for alternative ways to build skills. That is when he found Coursera and signed up for “Startup Engineering.” I think it is fair to say this changed his life. Since then, he quit his day job, started his own startup and is now at an incubator at Google in Madrid. He is about to launch the second version of his company’s product.

Then there is Amy, who migrated from Cuba to Miami. When she landed her first job in public relations in 2012, she realized she needed to elevate her English skills to be more marketable and compete with native English speakers in her field. She enrolled in Coursera’s “Crafting an Effective Writer” class. In three years, she has been promoted three times at two companies. She credits Coursera for this growth.

The world is changing. In the upcoming years, billions of people are going to come online for the very first time. We no longer need to enroll in the local community college to learn skills as an adult, or depend on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt as a student. We can chose what we want to learn, where we want to learn it, and how we will apply it to our life’s work. Coursera is doing something magical. And magic has no boundaries. It has no limits. It is not contained or isolated. It is empowering.

They say knowledge is power. If this is true, what you learn today has the power to change your tomorrow. If this is true, Coursera is shaping the future. Your future. My future. The world’s future. And you know something?

I think it’s true.

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Brian Rashid is the author of "It's Your Hour: Mastering Public Speaking in 60 Minutes"and creator of the 4 week online video training, "It's Your Hour: More Revenue Streams, More Freedom." He openly shares his personal experiences of money, lifestyle, leadership, and turning expertise into a well-paid profession at his blog at BrianRashid.com. For more information, content, and trainings, please enter your name and email on his website.