Skill Development Dashboards Improvements - May 2020

In October 2019, we launched the Skill Development Dashboards, which provided an unprecedented view of skills tracking—the ability to measure actual skills developed to specific proficiency levels. Since then, Coursera has been improving the way skills are tagged, measured, and represented. 

Coursera is committed to helping our customers build and track effective skill development programs within their organizations. The Skill Development Dashboard from Coursera is the key to understanding learning ROI by measuring actual skills developed. Gain even sharper insights into your program’s performance with this latest update, which enables tracking of 35 critical skill areas across four proficiency levels—doubling the granularity of your skills assessment capability.

With this update, you will be able to:

• Track critical skill areas from data science to leadership with 17 new skills areas added by popular demand, for a total of 35 skills
• Measure the effectiveness of data literacy, digital literacy, and other introductory-level programs with the introduction of a new early-stage proficiency level
• Understand the impact of your technical upskilling programs through the introduction of skills tracking for new technology and data science areas, from Theoretical Computer Science, Security Engineering, and DevOps to Data Analysis and Probability & Statistics
• Report on the impact of soft skill programs with tracking enabled for Leadership, Strategy and Operations, Business Psychology, Communication, and more
• See your picture of skills development become sharper over time with continuous ML-driven improvements to the models coupled with Coursera’s big data on the learning patterns of over 55 million learners

With these improvements, you may see some changes to the ways skills are currently distributed. This includes both learners tagged to new skills and losing tags of other skills. Your learners will not see any change to their learning experience.

After reading this article, you will know:

1. The improvements and impact of the changes to each of the skills development graphs
2. Where to find a list of FAQs associated with the skills development dashboards

Improvements and Impact

Organization-level admins will see the improvements by navigating to the Analytics homepage and selecting the Skills Development tab. The improvements will result in the below effects:

1. Updated the skills taxonomy to track up to 35 competencies, including Business Analysis and Computer Programming.
2. Improved our skill-to-course tagging model to remove mistagged content.
3. Added a new learner bucket “Conversant” to separate learners who are just starting a skill vs. “Beginner” learners who have a stronger foundation.
4. Updated the color scheme in existing charts to reflect the domains of each competency (Data Science, Tech, and Business).

Skills Development “Distribution” Graphs Old vs. New Design

Skills Development “Mastery” Graph Old vs. New Design

Skills Development “Learner Effort” Graphs Old vs. New Design

Skills Development “Skills Index” Graphs Old vs. New Design

Skills Development “Industry Trend” Graphs Old vs. New Design

FAQs

Q. What is the Coursera Skills Graph?
When new content is uploaded onto Coursera, that content is tagged with the skills it teaches. The content is scored based on learner performance, and job relevancy inferred by mapping to external sources that contain job requirements information. All of these data relationships are captured in the Coursera Skills Graph, which links content, learner, and job data.

Q. What are the Skill Development Dashboards?
The Skill Development Dashboards are the analytics suite that help our customers see skills tracked to specific proficiency levels.

Q. How does Coursera define proficiency levels?
Learners are classified into four levels: Conversant, Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced based on their performance on in-course assessments on the Coursera platform. All new learners are initially classified as Conversant. An Intermediate level indicates the ability to apply basic concepts on the job; learners can typically reach the intermediate level by completing assessments in one or two courses. Advanced level indicates mastery of the material and ability to both teach others and identify novel applications of skills; learners typically move from intermediate to advanced after completing assessments across several intermediate-difficulty courses. New learners with pre-existing knowledge who begin with advanced content will progress more quickly.

Q. What are assessments and how do they relate to skill tracking?
Assessments on Coursera have varying difficulty levels and can take various forms: multiple choice quizzes, programming assignments, peer-reviewed projects, and essays. Coursera measure’s the skill proficiency of employees using their performance on in-course assessments.

Q. What is the difference between Conversant vs. Beginner levels? How do learners move from level to level?
A learner's level is determined by the difficulty of the content they are taking. For Conversant to Beginner, Coursera looked at the learner’s level when they are able to pass assessments in introductory content. While the exact content varies, the way to interpret the Conversant level is a learner who has only just started learning a skill vs. Beginner who would be a learner who has already taken several assessments in a particular skill area and can speak to the basics of that skill.

To move to a more advanced level, learners need to take and pass graded assessments in courses of higher difficulty. For example, an Intermediate level learner will likely have taken 1-2 intermediate level courses.