Senior Reporting Analyst

SDSU partners with Coursera. Online courses, professional certificates available September 3, 2026 Anthony Salcito gave a presentation during the Student Learning and Success 360 Degrees: Connecting Across Curriculum, Value-Added Learning and Student Engagement conference on Aug. 19 in the Volstorf Ballroom. South Dakota State University is betting that some of the skills students need after graduation can be learned beyond the standard classroom. Through its partnership with Coursera, SDSU students have access to thousands of online courses and professional certificates at no additional cost. Executive director of the Center for Professional Enrichment and the Teaching Excellence (CPETE), Kevin Sackreiter, says the program supplements degrees and helps students develop skills outside their majors. But students said its value depends on whether the courses connect to their academic and career goals. For junior human biology pre-med student, Connor Singrey, an introductory artificial intelligence (AI) course helped him understand a technology he expects to become increasingly important in medicine. "I feel like AI is changing every single day," Singrey said. "It's nice to kind of have an introduction to all it can do." Singrey said the course helped him understand how AI works, including data centers and how AI systems process information. He said that knowledge could become useful as AI becomes more integrated into medicine. He said that knowledge could become useful in medicine as AI becomes more united into the field. "You're getting all kinds of things from AI or diagnosis," Singrey said. "It's just good to kind of be prepared for that." Mikael Nielson, a sophomore agricultural systems technology student, also completed an introductory AI course. He said he was initially interested because the course provided an opportunity to learn about a subject outside of his required coursework. The course took him about six hours, he said, while Singrey estimated his course took between eight and 10 hours over about two weeks. Both students said the self-paced format was one of the most useful aspects of Coursera. "It wasn't necessarily a course required, but it gave me a pathway to learn about something further in the course and something that further interested me without necessarily having to worry about the time commitment," Nielson said. That flexibility is part of what university officials see as the appeal of the platform. Anthony Salcito, Coursera's vice president of global government and education partnerships, said universities need to think about education beyond the traditional degree. The goal, he said, is for students to develop skills they can carry into the workforce through courses, micro credentials and continued learning. Sackreiter also views the platform as an additional tool rather than a replacement for the university's degree programs. The long-term measure of success, according to Sackreiter, will be whether students can point to the experience as something that made a difference in their careers and communities. Five or 10 years from now, administrators could measure completed courses and earned credentials. But Sackreiter said those numbers would not tell the entire story. The more meaningful measure would be what happens afterward. An SDSU graduate might tell the university that Coursera courses helped them obtain a job, solve a problem for an employer, or address an issue in their community. "That's our goal," Sackreiter said. "Our goal as an institution is to have an impact in the state and the region." For students, however, the immediate value can be less straightforward. Neither Singrey nor Nielsen said their certificates directly helped them obtain an internship or job. Singrey said the program provided networking opportunities, while Nielsen said people have noticed his certificate on LinkedIn. Because he studies agriculture, however, he has not had many conversations with recruiters about the AI course. Both students said they would probably not have taken the introductory AI course if SDSU had not provided access to it for free. "If it wasn't at SDSU going for a bachelor's, I probably would pay for it and do that learning on my own time," Singrey said. "But especially pursuing medicine, it doesn't show very much." Nielsen said he might pay for other Coursera courses in the future, but not necessarily the AI course because it is not directly related to agriculture. That difference shows one of the challenges of a broad university-wide platform - access does not necessarily mean use. Some students may not see the courses relevant to their degree or career. For him, the time was worthwhile because he saw a connection between AI and his future career. "I thought that it was a skill that I could use and knowledge that I would learn from," he said. Nielson also sees value in Coursera, but he does not view it as a replacement for a university education. Both students said a university degree provides something online courses cannot easily replicate: interaction with other people. "Part of my future job will be communicating with other human beings," Singrey said. "If you're going to learn from a video all the time, great. If you learn it, awesome, but you also have to be able to communicate your ideas to other people." Nielsen said Coursera can be useful for technical skills, but a university provides opportunities to develop communication, leadership and other interpersonal skills. That contrast is consistent with how SDSU officials describe the platform. Rather than replacing classroom learning, Coursera can provide an additional way for students to explore subjects outside their degree programs, said Greg Heiberger, dean of the Honors College. The students suggested several aspects where that supplemental role could be particularly useful. Nielsen said Coursera could help students develop technical skills such as Excel or specialized software. Singrey suggested personal finance, including budgeting, taxes and using Excel to track spending, as another area universities could supplement through online courses. The students also said Coursera courses could be incorporated into existing classes as optional material. Professors could use them to help students explore topics beyond required coursework. Nielsen said that is where he sees the greatest potential. Coursera can give students an opportunity to learn without worrying about whether every detail will appear on an exam, Nielsen said. That makes it more than a way to earn another credential. For SDSU, the question now is whether enough students will take advantage of the opportunity. Sackreiter said increased usage will be an important short-term measure, but the university also wants to hear from students who say Coursera helped them enter an internship better prepared, develop a new skill or gain an advantage in the workplace. "I would recommend they look into it to see if there's something that they are interested in," Nielson said. "If they could find a free course that they could just enroll in, and maybe it's a side hobby, maybe it's major related, interest related - if it's got some relation, it's a free course that they can take part of, I'd say, yeah, go for it." The university's investment ultimately depends on whether students do exactly that, not simply completing courses because they are available, but finding opportunities to turn those courses into skills they can use beyond SDSU.

Coursera's $100 million thesis: Andrew Ng will think of something. 1. September 2026 von juliafetz "Andrew is literally the only person that both Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have worked for. He is going to come up with things that nobody else can come up with." "We don't know exactly what those inventions and innovations will look like yet, but I'm highly confident that he is uniquely positioned to come up with things that we wouldn't have come up with on our own." That's Greg Hart, Coursera's CEO, on the July 29 earnings call, the first one since the Udemy merger, explaining why Coursera put $100 million into a company that doesn't have a product yet. To recap: LearnVector was founded by Andrew Ng, Coursera's co-founder and the current chairman of its board. It was announced one day before the earnings call, and the arrangement doesn't add up for me. Coursera provides the content, the distribution, and the money, and gets a third of the company in return. LearnVector's website itself felt very vibe-coded. In my experience, companies share a lot more with investors on an earnings call. Outside of using agentic AI for some sort of one-to-one learning platform built on Coursera and Udemy's content, there isn't much there. One thing I did learn is that Coursera is building what Hart called a "new AI-native unified platform," and expects to roll it out "over the first half of next year." Andrew Ng joined the call and gave prepared remarks. The wording was close to what LearnVector's website already said. After that, he didn't say anything else. Here are some of the questions analysts asked about LearnVector: * Why not buy back stock instead? * What is the commercial arrangement between the two companies? * Is this a conflict of interest, and why can't Coursera build this itself? Ng answered none of them. Coursera's CEO Greg Hart and CFO Mike Foley took the questions. The answers mostly came down to how good Andrew Ng is, and how much Coursera believes in him. There wasn't much about what he's actually going to build. Will LearnVector use Coursera's Course Content? One question stood out to me. An analyst asked whether LearnVector would train AI on Coursera's content. In his opening remarks, Andrew Ng talked about how learners want something they can trust, and how Coursera and Udemy have that trusted content. So the plan is to use the content in some way. At first the answer looks like a no. Here is Greg Hart: "They are not trained on the course content. Obviously, that's the IP of our partners. No, there is no training that is done on the course content other than the specific AI features that we have within each individual course." I read it a few times. LearnVector hasn't built anything yet, so there is nothing to train in the first place. Hart is telling Virtual Job Guru what is true today, not what happens once there is a product. Maybe I am reading too much into it. What Coursera is allowed to do with partner content. There is another question here. LearnVector is a separate company. Do Coursera's agreements with its partners even allow it to share their content with an outside company? Coursera filed its agreement with DeepLearning.AI, Andrew Ng's other company, as an exhibit to its IPO paperwork. Deals with a company's own chairman are related party transactions, and they get disclosed. It's the same reason Virtual Job Guru know that DeepLearning.AI has crossed $100 million in sales on Coursera. It's the only one of these contracts anyone can read, so I went through it. Here is the license grant, in Section 3.1(a): "Partner grants to Coursera a nonexclusive, sub-licensable, worldwide license to copy, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, publicly display, and otherwise use Partner Course Content on Coursera Properties and for reasonable marketing purposes." "Sub-licensable" means Coursera can pass those rights on. So handing content to another company is allowed. But only for use on "Coursera Properties," which the contract defines like this: "Coursera's properties (e.g., the Coursera website, mobile apps, and APIs; collectively, the 'Coursera Properties')" Mobile apps are in there, which is why Coursera can build something like Ollie, the app it launched in June, out of partner courses. So are APIs. There's already a precedent. In October 2025, Coursera became one of the first apps inside ChatGPT, putting Coursera videos into ChatGPT conversations. But that might fall under marketing purposes, which the contract does allow. The one contract Virtual Job Guru can see doesn't make it clear how Coursera's content could be used inside LearnVector. Either way, none of it says anything about what the people who made the courses get out of it. Class Central has written about this before. Both companies are allergic to paying the people who make the courses. Coursera started charging its partners a 15% platform fee last year. Udemy cut its instructors' share of revenue and promised payouts wouldn't fall, and I checked, and they fell anyway. If I were a content creator on these platforms, I wouldn't have a clear picture of how my content is going to be used, or how I will be paid for it. Coursera can't answer that yet either. Asked how the two companies will actually work together, Hart said: "We're working on a commercial relationship, but the high level approach is basically leverage the innovations that LearnVector comes up with to improve the platform on Coursera, and to deliver more personalized adaptive learning." And asked where LearnVector's products would end up: "As they are developed, they'll be available on the unified platform. Some of them may be available on one or both of the independent platforms as well. We haven't certainly gotten that far until we understand what some of the products might be." I've been reading these calls for years, and they usually give you more than the press release does. This one didn't. Coursera hasn't said what LearnVector will build, or how the arrangement will work. Between them, Coursera and Udemy bring in about $1.5 billion a year. The content creators behind that were not part of the conversation. For now, the strategy is that Andrew Ng will figure it out.