Education startup Coursera partners with 12 new universities, raises $3.7M and hits 1.6M enrollments

As we wrote back in April, there’s no doubt that the Internet is revolutionizing education, as more and more companies continue to emerge and alter the way we learn. We’ve kept a close eye on edX, Khan Academy, Academic Earth, P2PU, Skillshare and Codecademy, and rounding out that list is Coursera, one of the youngest of the bunch, which recently raised $16 million to launch with 37 undergraduate and graduate-level courses.

Now, since starting off with the likes of Princeton and Stanford, Coursera is announcing 12 new university partnerships, $3.7M in equity investments from Caltech, Penn and existing investors, and a total of 1.5M student users from 190 different countries. Update: Coursea has clarified that 1.5M refers to the number of course enrollments, and that there are currently around 680,000 registered students.

More specifically, here’s a list of the company’s 12 new partnering universities, following Coursera’s original four launch partners (Stanford, Princeton, University of Michigan and University of Pennsylvania):

Georgia Tech, Duke University, University of Washington, Caltech, Rice University, University of Edinburgh, University of Toronto, EPFL – Lausanne (Switzerland), Johns Hopkins University (School of Public Health), UCSF, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Virginia

As far as funding goes, this additional $3.7M brings Coursera’s total funding to “over $22 million.” If you’re itching to take part in Coursera’s brand new courses that will be introduced with these partnerships,  you can check out this list, which does not yet include new courses from UVA or University of Illinois. Update: The following is tentative and may change:

Caltech: Drugs & the Brain, Principles of Economics for Scientists, Galaxies & Cosmology

Duke: Bioelectricity, a quantitative approach, Healthcare innovation & entrepreneurship, Introductory Human Physiology, Intro to Genetics & Evolution, Intro to Astronomy, Think Again: How to Reason & Argue, Medical Neuroscience, A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior

Edinburgh: AI Planning, Astrobio, Intro to Philosophy, Equine Nutrition, Critical Thinking in Global Challenges, E-learning & Digital Cultures

Gatech: Energy 101, Computational Photography, Control of Mobile Robots, Computational Investing, Digitize

UCSF: Clinical Problem Solving, Nutrition for Health Promotion & Disease Prevention, Contraception: Choices, Culture & Consequences

EFPL: Programming Principles: Functions & Objects, Digital Signal Processing, Intro a la programming?

Toronto: Learn to Program: The Fundamentals, Learn to Program: Crafting Quality Code, Neural Networks for Machine Learning, The Social Context of Mental Health & Illness, Aboriginal World Views in Education

JHU: Data Analysis, Principles of Obesity Economics, Computing for Data Analysis, Mathematical Biostatistics Bootcamp, Health for All through Primary Health Care, Intro to the U.S. Food System: Perspectives from Public Health, Community Change in Public Health, Vaccine Trials: Methods & Best Practices

Rice: Interactive Python, Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering, Analytical Chemistry, Chemistry: Concept Development & Application, Nanotechnology

UW: Project Performance, Scientific Computing, Technical Leadership, The Hardware-Software Interface, Building an Information Risk Management Toolkit, Computational Methods, Computational Neuroscience, Decision Analysis in Engineering, Designing & Executing Information Security Strategies, Financial Data Modeling & Analysis, High-Performance Scientific Computing, Information Security & Risk Management in Context, Intro to Computer Programming using Python, Intro to Computer Communication Networks, Intro to Data Science, Investment Science, Navigating the Business Environment, Portfolio Construction & Risk Management, Programming Languages

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

Coursera is clearly moving in the right direction with these new partnerships. The only question I’m left with now is how the organization plans to continue to thrive and monetize its free platform as time goes on.

Organizations like Coursera are part of a push that could alter the way we learn forever. Education is easily one of the most important things in the world, and now there are countless ways and places to learn outside of the university. It’s exactly why technology startups in this space are so special; education for all, without the six figure tuition fees and lifelong debt.

➤ Coursera