Talking Micro-Credentials and Industry Skills with Coursera’s Scott Shireman

Following our GEDC Industry Forum webinar – Micro-Credentials for Macro-Learning - we sat down with the Global Head of Coursera for Campus, Scott Shireman. Prior to joining Coursera, Scott spent more than 20 years of his career working in universities, including at UC Berkeley, where he was an Associate Dean responsible for professional certificate programs. In this interview, he talks about the importance of industry-university collaboration, how micro-credentials can provide students with industry skills and the ways that Coursera for Campus is bridging the gap between university and industry.

What does Coursera for Campus do and what is your role?

Coursera for Campus provides world-class, job relevant, online learning for students, faculty and staff at universities around the world. As Global Head of Coursera for Campus, I get to work with universities worldwide to figure out how we can partner together and bring the best of what we can offer to create a transformative experience for their students.      

Why is Coursera for Campus a stakeholder in engineering education?

We at Coursera for Campus can help engineering schools solve two of their key challenges. One, through Career Academy, we can help increase student employability for entry level digital jobs with industry micro-credentials from companies like Google and Salesforce. Two, we can help fill critical gaps in curriculum. We have excellent courses from some of the world's best universities that can help make their curricula more robust and holistic.

How does Coursera for Campus support academic and industry stakeholders during this transformational period in higher education?

Coursera for Campus helps bridge a critical gap between academia and industry. Universities are great at teaching durable skills, such as critical thinking, and giving students the coaching and community that are really going to help them succeed over the course of their whole career. What tends to be more challenging for universities is understanding and keeping up with rapidly changing skills companies are looking for in entry level jobs. This is where Coursera for Campus is strongest. We have partnerships with companies like Meta and IBM and we really understand what they're looking for because together we build industry micro-credentials from their own subject matter experts that are offered on our platform. We can help universities make sure their graduates have the skills needed to be successful from day one.

--- Interested in Career Academy from Coursera? Get in touch

Why is university-industry collaboration important?

Today's university students are tomorrow's industry employees. It is in the interests of both sides to work together and try to better understand each other. Our internal research and external institutional research finds that students are more frequently choosing their university—or whether they're even going to university—based on their perception of employment opportunities. Collaborating with industry is essential for universities to enable them to provide employment opportunities for their students and stay up to date with the skills needed.

The GEDC Industry Forum webinar, Micro-Credentials for Macro-Learning, was really great. The panellists—Jennifer, Michael and Cynthia—did a really great job talking about how universities and industries can work together and the importance of micro-credentials. Micro-credentials are one effective way to help students develop the skills needed to be competitive in finding their next job.

Tell us about how Coursera works with universities and companies…

Coursera can serve as a bridge by bringing micro-credentials from industry to universities. Hundreds of companies use Coursera right now to upskill and reskill their employees on our platform, including with micro-credentials. So we have a lot of data on what skills industry needs for a given role. If a student wants to be a social media marketer, who better than Facebook to teach them these skills? If they want to be a data analyst or cybersecurity analyst, who better than IBM? Universities can partner with us to understand the employability skills their students need while offering world-class industry micro-credentials directly to their students.

Can you share an example of how Coursera is successfully working with universities and companies?

A great example is Hawaii Pacific University, one of our first Career Academy partners. They launched in the spring as part of our pilot phase, offering their students micro-credentials from companies I previously mentioned. This started as an optional layer on top of their degree programs, but was so popular among their students that faculty wanted to start integrating micro-credentials and Career Academy into their courses. The idea was to use it to flip the classroom, taking that online content and replacing lectures and one-way learning that traditionally happens. This allowed instructors and students to spend more time in rich discussions, project work and more. You really started to see stimulating ideas among the faculty in ways to transform their teaching. These possibilities of how micro-credentials can be integrated into and improve curriculum is really exciting.

Tell us more about your latest release, Career Academy…

Career Academy from Coursera is an offering to help universities prepare their students for in-demand digital jobs. With Career Academy, students learn cutting edge skills and earn professional certificates from some of the world's leading companies. Through guided projects, they practice and master skills with real-world tools and real-world problems that will help them to stand out with employers while exploring career paths.

What makes Career Academy a unique offering in higher education?

Firstly, the content presented to students is organized by job role, so they don't need to navigate a bulky course catalogue to find the courses they need. During the webinar, the point was made about how complicated it is for students to find the right micro-credential or the right content. With Career Academy, students just need to choose the job role that interests them and all the courses, including micro-credentials, are right there. My second point is that the content is developed and taught by subject matter experts from top industry partners like Google, IBM, Meta, Salesforce and more. Finally, there are curated guided projects that allow students to practice and master the tools used in each job role and solve the kinds of problems they'll encounter on the job. This gives students confidence to help them stand out in their job interviews because they have these stories about solving real-world problems with real-world tools.

How do you envision the relationship between digital certificate programs and traditional on-campus degrees evolving over time?

I envision this relationship evolving to be complementary. The webinar touched on this in terms of the university’s role and the role of the micro-credentials. I have a 16 year old son so I've been thinking a lot about this topic and what kind of education will work for him. Even though I work for an edtech company, I still very much hope my son has a traditional, four year, on-campus degree experience like the one I had. There's a lot of value in that experience, such as learning critical thinking skills and getting the community and coaching that carries you throughout your career. I don't want him to miss that. I also hope that he graduates with the skills and the credentials needed to get a job that he loves. Being in a job that you enjoy is important for happiness. Digital certificate programs and industry micro-credentials are really effective and we shouldn't position this as a choice students have to make between traditional and new. Instead, as higher education leaders, figuring out how we can offer the best of both is the best way we can serve our students.

How else can Coursera's world-class content be integrated into a students' learning experience?

Beyond Career Academy, we have universities all over the world integrating Coursera’s world-class content into their students’ learning experiences. We often see universities doing this to fill gaps in their curriculum, such as when engineering schools offer our advanced technology courses as electives or in very specific topic areas where they do not have the faculty to teach, like an AI specialization in a computer science program. They can bring our courses from world-class universities to create specialized content that their students are looking for. Another way is to bolster durable skills development in areas like leadership or communications. Other schools use our courses to flip the classroom.

If you're an institution and this sounds really valuable to you, but you don't have the experience or the time, where should you start?

If you think about this from a university perspective, there are thousands of companies and if you're a company, there are thousands of universities. How do you do this in a way that's going to give enough critical mass to matter? That's where Coursera fits in. We have the partnerships with universities and industry and we know the skills students need to learn. We are an aggregator who sits in the middle, working with companies to build the micro-credentials and curriculum. If you're a university and you're really excited about micro-credentials and are looking at where to start, come talk to us. We'd love to talk with you about how we can take the micro-credentials we've already built and make them available to your students.

--- Interested in Career Academy from Coursera? Get in touch