Creating new ways to provide truly personalized learning

As organizations acclimatize to remote working, so too must their training programs. And with face-to-face training not possible in the current environment, organizations are turning to online learning to prepare for a digital future.

This shift is at the heart of Coursera’s growing demand for Guided Projects. Launched in April this year, these projects are a new way of offering hands-on learning experiences for job-relevant skills across data science, technology, and business. As they take less than two hours to complete, learners build the job skills they need, right when they need them.

Guided Projects advance the online learning experience by enabling immediate application of skills. According to the “Forgetting Curve” study, we forget about 75% of new information after just six days if we don’t apply it. Guided Projects address this by using step-by-step guidance and a virtual cloud workspace to apply skills to the real-world.

Organizations like Nokia are using Guided Projects to drive continuous reskilling across teams. Nokia uses them as part of their curriculum to equip global data science teams with the skills they need to adapt to the workforce of the future.

According to Steve Tadeo, Data Science and Analytics Specialist at Nokia, Guided Projects provide the perfect transition from “I understand” to “I can do”, in a wide range of valuable, job-relevant skills.

When you start a Guided Project, you read an overview of the project structure, get introduced to your instructor, and see your learning objectives. You’re then prompted to open a platform called Rhyme to work on projects. Rhyme is Coursera’s hands-on learning platform that provides a unique, side-by-side learning interface as you complete each step.

After you complete the project, you return to your course homepage and take a quiz to check what you’ve learned. When you pass the quiz, you complete the Guided Project and earn a shareable certificate that showcases what you’ve learned.

So far we’ve seen great success from these Projects. There are more than 460 of them on our platform, with plans to reach 1,000 by the end of the year. Guided Projects have attracted over one million enrollments from learners around the world in the past five months.

Hagigat Hasanova, a learner from Estonia explains that as a master’s degree student, Guided Projects have been incredibly valuable in helping her gain the practical technology and business skills needed to apply to her studies.

To date, UK learners have enrolled the most in Guided Projects that fall into the Data Science domain, followed by Business, Information Technology, Physical Science and Engineering, and Maths.

We encourage you to explore all Guided Projects on our platform. You can get started with a curated collection that focuses on learning specific data science, business, or computer skills:

• Acquire Business Skills with GSuite Apps
• Beginner TensorFlow and Keras Guided Projects
• Machine Learning Guided Projects with Scikit-Learn
• Software Development Projects for Beginners
• Android Development Projects for Beginners.

And whilst the launch of Guided Projects is part of our ongoing effort to provide innovative, hands-on learning experiences to learners, our next move is helping organizations customize these learning experiences through the launch of Private Authoring.

From August 25th, using our powerful authoring tools, organizations are now able to translate their knowledge into content tailored to their institutional needs. This enables them to become educators themselves, to support institutional knowledge sharing. They can now author private Guided Projects, courses, and assessments.

Considering The World Economic Forum expects 42 percent of jobs will require an entirely different skill set by 2022 and 75 million jobs will likely be displaced in 20 major economies, companies need the agility to move resources to emerging areas and the ability to create their own content in response to that change.

Private authoring is designed to help address this challenge. It allows organizations to leverage the same tools that are used by Coursera’s world-class university and industry partners to create content for their employees’ consumption only, hosted on Coursera’s platform.

They can build courses with all types of content – from video to readings, guided projects, quizzes, peer reviews, and many more. For each course offering the instructor can also tailor the grading, assets, and settings as needed.

In this way, L&D becomes less about ticking boxes and more about enabling learners to develop their potential, delivering training that has a real impact on performance.

Companies such as Hertz are already using authoring tools to develop Guided Projects in areas like IT, SaaS management, application troubleshooting, data visualization, and software onboarding.

Now is the time for companies to be forward-thinking and anticipate the roles needed tomorrow and the skills that will bring them to life. This will be critical in ensuring organizations thrive in this new era of work.

By Shravan Goli, Chief Product Officer and Namit Yadav, General Manager, Rhyme.

HRD Connect Curators of the New Business Landscape. HRD Connect produces industry-recognized content for senior HR leaders. Through articles, case studies, Q&As, podcasts, events, and more, we offer truly progressive and cutting-edge insights designed to help people leaders address core HR challenges and add greater value to their business.

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