Coursera is a learning management platform from the company of the same name in Mountain View, California.
$49
per month
Skillsoft Leadership Development Program
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
Skillsoft offers their Leadership Development Program, with a number of course offerings featuring scenarios and model behavior, reflection exercises and other curricula to train learning or first-time managers.
The Coursera platform can be a useful part of your overall learning content portfolio if utilized correctly. It's fantastic for asynchronous courses that don't necessarily need a dedicated faculty member (though I'd highly recommend at least having some discussion moderators/student workers) and for offering MOOCs. The ability for the learners to contribute translations really makes it ideal for the international learning community - I am always amazed to see a course we launched with 2-3 languages to quickly have 10-12 more added. This feature really helps expand the audience reach and Coursera has such a large following already that it can grow seemingly overnight.
They have a large library - make sure you clearly study the library offerings and choose the courses that are best for you as you will never be able to use all of them. Make sure you survey your user base before purchasing the licensing of the library courses so the courses are 'marked' with an employee in mind to keep costs minimized. Only purchase the Books 24x7 if you have a large IT department - otherwise you might want to lease a smaller content portion. Their Leadership Development, Project Management, business series and critical thinking and technical products are exceptional.
Interaction: the student learns by doing. For programming courses, this means programming!
Assessments: the courses I'd taken ask students to grade each others work with a rubric. This is hugely effective and permits tests and quizzes to be other than multiple choice.
Creativity and enthusiasm of the instructors. Some of the approaches demonstrated real out-of-the-box thinking by the instructors. For example, the Rice Python course was a self-contained website requiring no installation of IDE on one's computer, and the final project was a working version of Asteroids.
Low cost of entry: most of the course I enrolled in were free, with an optional fee for certifications. This really gives people the freedom to explore learning. It's almost like a Public Library of Learning.
Coursera forces a weekly discipline on the user with lectures and assignments and this really motivates one to put in the effort.
Covers a wide-breadth of topics ranging from desktop / office skills to communications skills to leadership development
Offers knowledge portals (Knowledge Centers) around specific topic areas such as Management Development, Six Sigma, Professional Foundations, Sales, etc - that aggregate content from the large Skillsoft resources and present it in a way that is both meaningful and relevant to the learners. Plus, they have editors update the featured topic each month.
Include a wide variety of learning media such as eLearning courses, books, book summaries and videos.
Some of the courses (very few) have some old information (more than 2 years), and in some areas like technology the information has to be very new and updated.
Some professors or people doing videos are not good in front of the camera, they should train their people a little bit more for those things.
The platform does have room to improve their response time for assistance. Depending on the issue an internal "help team may be required"
They removed what was called "knowledge centers" which could be summed up as an accumulation of books, courses, exams, practice exams, articles and basically any asset within the platform surrounded by a particular subject. This was a great benefit to some of our customer. It was a one-stop-shop but now you would need to search independently for all of those assets.
Because the platforms library can be customized its a bit of a struggle to have certain assets changed or modified within Skillsoft. You basically are on their time when it comes to updates or any major changes you as a customer would like to make.
I would recommend to renew as this is part of our employee development goals and we make a strong commitment to develop employees' people skills. I think SkillSoft has a very innovative approach to develop people's interpersonal skills other than traditional classroom learning.
The integration between the main Skillsoft portal and Books24x7 could use improvement. Most users don't realize there is actually a separate books portal because the link to it is not that visible. Yet, once they discover it, they realize that the books portal is actually easier to use to search for books, ebook summaries, and videos.
Just that it takes a village. It cannot be done alone. Everyone needs to know what you are doing and what their role is in the implementation. Tightly managing the project management schedule and resources is important in ensuring that everything gets done on time, and with quality. Education is KEY
I think Coursera has the best overall interface. I think you will find that different platforms go in different directions, and have different specialities. For the most part the differences are more in the types of courses they offer than one being particularly better than the other, so it comes down to content for me.
We chose SkillSoft for the overall ease of use for both our users and our administrators and have a great value proposition. We have continued our contracts for the same reasons and the relationship we have built with our Learning Consultant and Account Representative.
The greatest benefit of Coursera is access to quality courses on various subjects that you can either browse or dive in deeply. Customizable, flexible and accessible.
Helps our department to recommend trainees courses on this website and gain important knowledge. Also, the courses are provided by big-name universities which helps students in their careers
