Discover Coursera: study online at the best universities in the world

Coursera is a global platform created by Stanford University professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Yom in 2012. It unites more than 77 million students and provides an opportunity to take courses from the best universities in the world. Here you can take a course from Yale or Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley and others. Courses are available in literally all fields of knowledge. You can take a course on negotiations, finance, programming, there are even courses on the science of your own health and well-being.

The materials on the platform are close to the traditional form of education: lectures, tests, homework, tests, exams. If something is not clear to the student, there is an opportunity to discuss the topic on a special forum where students and teachers communicate. Most of the material is available in English. You can study both on a desktop computer and owing to a phone.

Most of the courses on the platform are shareware: you can take the course for free, but if you want to get a certificate, you need to pay. The most popular certificates are from Google and IBM. The cost of courses is from $ 9.99 for the shortest and from $ 9,000 for long-term programs for 2-4 years, as a result of which you can get a diploma similar to what is awarded to graduates of the stationary form of education. There is a subscription for unlimited access to 90% of the courses for $59 per month or $399 per year.

How to access Coursera

Register on coursera.org website as on any other. After registration, select the area you want to study, select one of the courses on the website and click “Participate” button. After that, the course materials will open, and the course itself will be added to your profile.

Do Kazakh universities count the courses taken on Coursera?

Each university decides for itself whether to consider the credits completed by a student on Coursera. Usually, the university approves several courses available for transfer under your educational program, and you can take them during the semester directly on the platform. Contact Department’s management to find out if the given program is valid at your University.

What program is Kazakhstan implementing together with Coursera

Kazakhstan has been implementing the joint program with Coursera since 2023, under which our country acquires 20,000 licenses for Kazakhstani students. Licenses will be distributed to 25 regional universities, which themselves will distribute them among their students. At each university, responsible persons have been appointed who will have access to administrators and will monitor the learning process and analyze students’ success.

50 priority courses are already available on the platform in Kazakh and Russian, they cover such areas as programming and digitalization, mathematics, physics, marketing and others. According to Minister of Higher Education and Science Sayassat Nurbek, 100,000 Kazakhstani students will have access to Coursera platform in the next three years. At Satbayev University, this program has been in effect since August 2022 for students of Automation and Information Technology Institute.