Eventually “all learning is going to happen digitally,” according to Jeff Maggioncalda, chief executive of online learning platform Coursera. But Maggioncalda isn’t rehearsing the tired trope that massive open online courses offered by the likes of Coursera will drive traditional universities out of business. Instead, he predicts that learning on university campuses will increasingly happen online over the next five-ten years.
“The boundaries between online and on-campus will blur together,” he told Times Higher Education. “Students will sit in the classroom on computers, interacting, asking questions and taking notes. It’s a much more engaging interactive learning session.” Maggioncalda highlights how the universities of Leeds and Illinois already offer Coursera Moocs to campus-based students. “People are using them as a more effective textbook,” he says.
Maggioncalda, who replaced former Yale University president Rick Levin at the top of Coursera last year, also predicts significant increases in the use of communication technology such as two-way video and data analytics to personalise digital learning, and make it more flexible. Where learning will increasingly shift from university campuses to online platforms, is in the area of lifelong learning, says Maggioncalda. “In the future, lifelong learning is going to be a necessity,” he argues, since, as automation becomes more prevalent, jobs will become obsolete and workers will require new skills. “People will be scrambling to upgrade themselves,” he predicts.
Maggioncalda says the “most intense” version of reskilling is happening in India, where millions working in industries are at risk of automation. “The rate of growth of Coursera in India is higher than in almost every other country, though in Latin America we have very high growth rates as well,” he says. “In some developing countries the situation is Darwinian: learn or lose your job. People need to learn new skills and in my view, they will get them increasingly online because they cannot move their families to campus and pay high tuition.”
Coursera’s growth strategy is to offer more online degrees. The California-based platform recently announced that it is offering its first degrees from UK universities, a new public health Masters from Imperial College London, as well as a computer science bachelor’s from the University of London. “We currently offer four with six more coming, but ultimately we’ll have hundreds,” he says.
Maggioncalda also predicts that degrees will increasingly be divided into micro-credentials. As the idea of lifelong learning takes hold, “you will be able to earn parts of degrees, maybe just the part you want then, and come back later”, he says. “The university degree isn’t going to go away but it will evolve,” he says.