COVID-19 crisis has led to the lockdown, which made educational institutions to remain close. All the students have to spend time in their home. This could be a good opportunity for students to learn new courses.
Online learning platform Coursera is providing free courses for its users. They are providing up to 3,800 courses for free. The Coursera Workforce initiative is a part of the Coursera Government training Program for Government employees. The goal of this initiative is to help workers to develop skills during this lockdown. Also Coursera says “ One can’t apply as an individual for the free courses; government agencies that serve unemployed workers have to apply for access.
According to the Coursera website “Coursera for Government is designed for government agencies to provide reskilling and upskilling programs for entire communities”. In the US about 26 million people are unemployed in the last few weeks due to stay at home orders.
The free courses include company-specific training programs from Coursera partners like Google and IBM. There are also many courses in areas like cloud computing, emerging technologies, machine learning, big data, and other business-specific training.
Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda says “Coursera, along with its community of partners, is ready to serve the millions of workers who have lost their jobs and are going to have a hard time returning in a slow economy”. These courses will be first available in the US and soon extends to Greece, Colombia, Costa Rica, Malaysia, Panama, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. Also, Coursera is willing to add more government agencies in the coming weeks.