When two Stanford University professors started Coursera in 2012, the focus was on building free online courses to bring teaching from elite colleges out to the world. Back then, the target market was people who couldn’t get to a traditional campus, and places like Stanford had little interest in teaching their own students via the online format.
But the pandemic has forced those selective colleges to embrace online learning like never before, and now all types of colleges are teaching online. So Coursera sees a new business opportunity: to sell the courses it developed to colleges that want to use them as part of for-credit courses for their own students.
