MOOC-Style Skills Training

WGU joins tech giants in using a MOOC digital infrastructure with the chops to go big with online learning. Also, we chat with Coursera’s CEO about how AI is influencing education and jobs, and Meta University will bring in its last cohort this summer, a sign of the changing times in tech.

Open Source for Affordable Online Reach

The online titan Western Governors University is experimenting with an open-source learning platform. So are Verizon and the Indian government. And the platform’s leaders want to help community colleges take the plunge on competency-based education.

Open edX was created in 2012 and later powered edX, a groundbreaking online learning venture managed by MIT and Harvard University. The edX platform was a key player in the MOOC movement, which influenced online learning in higher education and may have accelerated its acceptance.

The online learning company 2U bought edX in 2019 for roughly $800M. The two universities used that money to create a foundation, the Axim Collaborative, which runs the Open edX project. The nonprofit philanthropy is focused on driving economic mobility and increasing access to high-quality learning opportunities.

The Open edX platform inherently supports self-paced learning and offers several features that make it a good fit for competency-based education and skills-forward learning, says Stephanie Khurana, Axim’s CEO.

“Flexible modalities and a focus on competence instead of time spent learning improves access and affordability for learners who balance work and life responsibilities alongside their education,” she says.

Yet it seems surprising that one of the nation’s largest online universities—and by far the most successful CBE-based institution—would find value in an open-source platform. Part of the draw, says David Morales, WGU’s CIO and senior vice president of technology, is Open edX’s modular data architecture.

“We are able to track student events and actions at a much more granular level,” he says. That means Open edX “delivers real-time data to our faculty and staff—ultimately improving student support.”

WGU has used the platform for years. In February, the university announced a deeper partnership, offering guidance and a team of engineers to help shape the project and deepen its reach. Open edX expects to partner with other universities for similar roles.

The platform offers self-paced course structures, comprehensive content management, forums, integration with proctoring systems, and more, says Courtney Hills McBeth, the chief academic officer and provost at WGU.

“It was built specifically for online education with a flexible schedule,” she says, “instead of being based on or locked into a fixed structure of courses, semesters, or academic years.”

Workforce-Aligned and Affordable: The platform’s flexibility can be an accelerator for competency-based education, says Lisa McIntyre-Hite, executive VP and COO of the Competency-Based Education Network.

“Plus, being open source means institutions and organizations can collaborate to build and share CBE-specific tools and features,” she says, “which could lower costs and speed up innovation across the field.”

Axim thinks Open edX’s ability to scale affordably can support community colleges in reaching working learners across an underserved market. The foundation is seeking to work with a handful of community colleges in the next few months to help them meet rising demand for skills-forward credentials and certifications. For this project Axim has partnered with C-BEN and Unicon, an ed-tech consulting firm.

The foundation also wants to make it easier for two-year colleges to work with local employers, by offering tailored and AI-focused curricula, for example. Other potential uses through the platform include creating microcredentials from existing courses, remixing manufacturing courses, and co-creating content with industry partners.

“Our broader intention is that community colleges will see the Open edX platform as a way to quickly launch and scale new workforce-aligned programs, in response to local employer needs and rapid technology disruption, without incurring significant license or technology support fees,” Khurana says.

Gone Global: Roughly a quarter of the 2K or so organizations that currently use Open edX are corporate partners, some of which tap the platform for upskilling and reskilling workers.

For example, Verizon uses it to help deliver Skill Forward, a free skills training program that features 250 courses across 84 professional certificate tracks. Those certs are aimed at high-demand jobs in AI, business, coding, communication, finance, and IT, among others. Axim says the platform’s lack of a per-user license fee is helpful for the partnership with Verizon.

IBM uses Open edX as the core platform for its Skills Network, a global upskilling and reskilling project. Beyond standard courses, the company customizes Open edX to offer hands-on lab environments, AI-powered grading tools, and a competition-management system that enables massive-scale events like a hackathon including 176K employees.

On the government front, a public-private venture in India has developed a national learning management system built on the Open edX platform. The Skill India Digital Hub seeks to boost the employability of people across the country—even in the smallest villages—with mobile-first online courses offered in 14 languages.

More than 13M verified users in India have registered through the platform, across courses ranging from basic literacy instruction to advanced technical training.

Looking forward, Khurana says Open edX will continue to lean into helping competency-based learning models deliver on their promise.

The Kicker: “CBE’s emphasis on practical skills and workforce readiness can help underserved learners gain the credentials they need to secure meaningful employment,” she says.

Coursera’s CEO on AI and Online Education

Along with edX and Udacity, Coursera is part of the OG trio of MOOC companies. The online course provider has changed a lot since it was launched in 2012 by Stanford University’s Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng. These days Coursera partners with 350-plus universities and companies to offer online content ranging from projects to professional certificates.

With a global reach, Coursera has a broad perspective on how artificial intelligence is playing out. 

For example, the company offers 650 courses on generative AI. Last year, it saw six new enrollments per minute in those courses. As of April, that number had risen to nine. And while the U.S. still has an edge over India for registered Coursera users—31M to 28M—interest in gen AI on Coursera among Indian learners outpaces that of their American counterparts.

A global survey released this week by the company found that 17% of students have earned a microcredential in gen AI. And 93% of students say gen AI training belongs in degree programs.

Greg Hart shared the enrollment figures with me during an interview in early April. As a longtime technical advisor to Jeff Bezos, Hart formerly ran Amazon’s Alexa/Echo and Prime Video divisions. He took the helm at Coursera earlier this year. 

For a new episode of The Cusp podcast, Hart and I discussed AI’s impact on Coursera’s work and the company’s view of how the tech is influencing higher education and jobs.

The Kicker: “My personal opinion is that AI is just going to be the new software,” Hart says. “And that all software, regardless of what field it’s in, regardless of what space it’s in, will be augmented and/or generated by AI.”

Closure of Meta University

Meta will soon bring in the last cohort of students in Meta University, its equity and diversity–focused training program that had been a model for the industry. The program’s closure is part of a larger shift away from DEI efforts among tech giants and other companies that began amid backlash a couple years ago and has intensified since Donald Trump returned to office in January.

The Big Idea: Amazon and Google have also rolled back DEI-focused training programs. Big Tech employees and advocates for diversity in tech say the moves could stymie any progress that had been made in recent years on diversifying tech pipelines. They also mark a bigger change in the landscape of tech hiring in which there are fewer entry-level jobs and advances in AI are creating new roles and changing others.

“For early talent pipelines, the closure of these programs is problematic, but also the halt in hiring talent because of AI shifts and automation shifts,” says Kirsten Lundgren, director of economic and workforce initiatives at the Kapor Center. “It creates a lot of challenges for early talent, and this is just yet another obstacle.”

Meta University, in particular, had focused on recruiting students from four-year colleges and universities with large, diverse populations that don’t typically send graduates to Big Tech companies.

“By losing Meta University, we lose access to talent that isn't Ivy League, that isn't your top-tier colleges,” says Ernesto Flores, who worked as a recruiter at Meta from 2017 to 2022 and recruited at HBCUs and Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) for Meta University. “What this program did was really build the confidence, the necessary skill set, and the tools needed to be able to excel and thrive in these tech environments that are very fast-paced.”

The Details: Unlike many traditional tech internship programs that start in the latter half of an undergraduate’s enrollment, Meta University was for freshmen and sophomores. The 10-week program helped them get accustomed to working at Meta and get up to speed on skills. Meta mentors could even advise students on what classes to take when they returned to campus to make them more competitive. All this helped prepare them for an internship their junior or senior year, which is critical to breaking into the industry.

“You don’t just hire underrepresented talent,” Flores says. “You have to build infrastructure internally to keep the talent and develop the talent and not just get them in the door. That’s one thing that I think many companies miss.”

Read the full story on Work Shift. —By Colleen Connolly

Open Tabs

Entry-Level Jobs
The labor market for recent college graduates has deteriorated noticeably this year, finds the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The unemployment rate for this group swelled to 5.8% from 4.8%. Underemployment rose sharply to 41.2%. AI could be contributing, Derek Thompson writes for The Atlantic. He cites the recent grad gap—unemployment of young college graduates compared to the overall labor force—which slid to an all-time low last month.

Slashing Science
The National Science Foundation last week canceled $203M in “wasteful DEI grants,” the Department of Government Efficiency said on X. Hundreds of other NSF grants were eliminated the previous week, for a total reduction of $325M. NSF director Sethuraman Panchanathan resigned last week, saying the agency is an important investment to make U.S. scientific dominance a reality. “We must not lose our competitive edge,” he said.

Earn and Learn
Fully 80% of voters support the expansion of apprenticeship programs, with little variation across party lines, according to a Morning Consult poll of registered voters that was conducted for Jobs for the Future. Strong majorities also said they back a federal government role in helping Americans afford education and job training beyond high school (75%) and in helping unemployed Americans learn a new skill and find a new job (76%).

Supporting Students
Ohio community college programs based on wraparound student supports developed by the City University of New York system boosted the earnings of participants by 14% in the eighth year after they enrolled, according to an evaluation by MDRC. The CUNY ASAP program also recently was found to increase graduation rates. The strategy is being replicated across North Carolina and Colorado, with support from Arnold Ventures.

Job Moves
Martin Pollio has been named president of Ivy Tech Community College, Indiana’s two-year college system. Pollio is superintendent of the Jefferson County Public School District in Louisville, Kentucky.

Robert Espinoza has resigned as CEO of the National Skills Coalition after serving in that role for a year. Brooke DeRenzis, the nonprofit group’s chief strategy officer, is the interim CEO.

The Kapor Center and C-BEN, both of which are quoted in this issue, are supporters of Work Shift. You can read our policy on editorial independence here. Thanks for reading! To support our work, donate here. —PF