HSE Marks 5th Year of Teaching on Coursera

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On February 24, 2014, HSE launched its first course on the Coursera online education platform. Along with St. Petersburg State University and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, HSE was one of the first Russian universities to host a course on the platform. Now HSE ranks among the top ten universities with the highest number of courses available on the platform, offering 91 courses which have garnered 1.6 million subscriptions.

Evgenia Kulik,
Director of the eLearning Development Centre

Working with Coursera is very important to us, because it allows us to achieve a few things all at once. Firstly, the mission of Coursera closely aligns with that of our university—to make quality education available to as many students as possible so that they can become successful. Anyone, regardless of place of residence or education, can listen to lectures by our leading professors.

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Secondly, HSE online courses on Coursera allow us to position our scientific schools, our educational programmes and, generally, Russian education within students’ reach in the professional academic community. 170 top universities from all over the world make their courses available on Coursera, and it is important to us to be a part of this endeavor. There are very strong educational programmes (including English-taught ones) in Russia that are capable of competing with programmes of leading foreign universities for both Russian and foreign students. Thanks to our online courses, students can get a sense of the level and quality of the teaching at HSE and make an informed decision to study at a Russian university.

Finally, Coursera is a key technology partner, with whom we are developing new formats of digital educational products, marketing models, methods and training technologies that may become widespread in the near future. For example, we see a serious demand for our practice-oriented specializations—a course bundle that provides students concrete, practical skills.

Looking back over the past 5 years, we can say that by our five-year anniversary with Coursera, HSE has produced a significant number of successful online courses and specializations and that we have become a leader not only in course-output, but in the amount of interest garnered from listeners.

Some more facts and figures about HSE online courses

The first course of the Higher School of Economics to be uploaded onto Coursera was Nikolay Berzon’s course ‘Financial markets and institutions’. It is available to this day with a total of 27,714 enrollees

 HSE offers 6 specializations on Coursera

 The HSE Advanced Machine Learning specialization made the 2018 list of ‘Best Content on Coursera’, a ranking determined by the highest number of member registrations from the beginning of 2018 to October 2018

 Out of the 91 HSE courses on Coursera, 50 are in Russian and 41 are in English.

 In 2018, 124 HSE lecturers taught online courses on Coursera

 In 2018, HSE online courses attracted students from 195 countries, with Russia, the USA, and India being the most represented