Q3’19 Product Outlook (July 24, 2019)

This quarter, providing more powerful functionality to our Admins is our first big focus area—and we’ve got exciting developments in the works. These tools will help you to motivate and engage your learners—and understand how they are performing. 

Simplified contract management*

First, we’re updating our contract management systems to make renewals easier. An important part of this update is to enable you to buy and structure the platform the same way your organizations are structured. With our updated contract management system in place, you will be able to view and manage learners across programs and contracts, buy centrally as an L&D organization, and distribute and cap licenses by each Business Unit or Department. By switching learners from one contract to the other, you’ll avoid service interruptions to your learners.

Learner communication tools

Second, we will be launching more tools and functionality so you can engage with different learner populations across your organization. We understand the importance of communicating with your learners and plan to add functionality to support increased learner engagement in your programs.

New admin portal look and feel

To make the administration experience more user-friendly, we’ll be updating the central portal to make navigation easier and giving admins the ability to customize what metrics to show upon login. We’ll also be implementing program management capabilities right on the homepage, including the ability to search for and sort programs.  

Enhanced learner profiles and new reports 

We know it’s important for you to understand learning progress by the way your business is organized. To that end, we’re launching new functionality that lets you upload additional learner profile information, including job title, department/BU, location, and manager name. This also means reports will now reflect this information—so you can understand how your program is performing at the regional or business unit level. 

Introducing: A fresh Learner Experience and Coursera Quickstarts

We’re always testing and improving the course browsing experience to encourage learners to enroll in courses. Starting last month, we launched an improved learner experience with better discoverability, improved design that removed extraneous links and calls-to-action, and smoother flows that drive learners toward enrollment and course participation. As part of our effort to engage learners on-platform with ongoing learning, we also launched Coursera Quickstarts—short, standalone excerpts from popular, relevant courses. 

Don’t worry—learner experience improvements will not affect your administration experience or your program content. 

Skill transformation and beyond*

We are currently researching a prototype concept that will help companies understand the skills their learners are learning on Coursera, their aggregate skills levels, and their most skilled employees. We are hoping to get this functionality in the hands of our customers sometime in Q3—stay tuned for more.

If you have any questions or feedback about our product work, we want to learn from you. Apply to join the Coursera for Business Product Advisory Council here.

On behalf of the entire team, we look forward to another quarter of continued partnership and learning together. Onward and upwards!

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* these features are not available for customers who have purchased Coursera’s Team Plan (online)