Coursera Announces Pilot Program with Publishers to Supplement Online Courses with High Quality Content

Mountain View, CA - May 8, 2013 –Coursera, a leading massive open online course (MOOC) provider, today announced a pilot program with several of the top higher education publishers to expand the availability of their high-quality content and resources, to be facilitated byChegg, the student hub where students can access the tools and materials they need to succeed.

Starting today, publishers Cengage Learning, Macmillan Higher Education, Norton, Oxford University Press, SAGE, and Wiley will experiment with offering to Coursera students, at no cost for the duration of the course, versions of their e-textbooks, delivered via Chegg’s DRM-protected e-Reader. Coursera is also actively discussing pilot agreements and related alliances with Springer and additional publishers. The importance of rigorously developed pedagogical resources to learning outcomes has been well documented, and today’s announcement will link Coursera’s content to this enhanced learning process. While professors teaching Coursera's broad course offerings have until now been able to assign high-quality content freely available on the Web, they will now be able to work with top publishers to provide an even wider variety of carefully curated teaching and learning materials at no cost to the student.

The involvement of several key publishers in this announcement aligns, for the first time, their long-standing commitment to and investment in online education with Coursera’s mission, which includes working within existing frameworks to improve educational access. In addition to gaining insight into worldwide usage data, publisher will be able sell full versions of their e-textbooks to students for continued personal learning.

Coursera’s collaboration with leading publishers and Chegg, like its collaboration with top universities, is an innovative step forward for free online education, providing students who previously might not have had easy access to textbooks with the deeper and more comprehensive learning experience that these resources provide.

“We recognize the importance of forging partnerships with other stakeholders in the education space in order to help students overcome barriers and evolve the way they access education. By collaborating with publishers, we are able to provide access to some of the world’s best resources to Coursera students, supporting our goal of learning without limits,” said Daphne Koller, Co-founder of Coursera.