Remote work opportunities for SA students

STUDENTS throughout South Africa and the African continent have a great opportunity to get skills from the ubiquitous learning platform Coursera and earn an income from digital jobs abroad that can now be done remotely, according to Jeff Maggioncalda, chief executive officer of Coursera.

“The availability of jobs and the availability of learning is going to be far more accessible than it was before the pandemic, so I would encourage all the learners in South Africa, to learn these skills because your ability to get good careers is going to increase because of remote work – and the new careers don’t have necessarily have to be in South Africa; it’s borderless,” he said.

He said almost 50000 South Africans will be given an opportunity to register for courses under the banner of the National Electronic Media Institute of SA as part of an agreement with Coursera.

There are currently 2.4 million individuals who have been on Coursera courses throughout Africa.

Maggioncalda said when the world of work opens up after the pandemic, remote work would provide great opportunities because not everybody is going to go back to the office, resulting in more people working remotely.

“This (remote working) opportunity will be very important for South African, who can learn from Yale or Stanford or Johns Hopkins, universities that are not in their country, and can also get jobs at employers who are not in their country,” he said.

He added that even without a tertiary qualification, there are many new

digital jobs that one can get skilled for in less than 50 hours online.

“I would encourage all the learners in South Africa to learn these skills because your ability to get good careers is going to increase because of remote work,” he said.

The cutting-edge courses offered by Coursera include machine learning, blockchain and cryptocurrency, as well as entry level opportunities in the world of artificial intelligence.

Launched nine years ago by Stanford Computer Science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, with a mission to provide universal access to world-class learning, Coursera has rapidly become one of the largest online

learning platforms in the world. It has 82million registered learners globally.

Maggioncalda said many view Coursera as a website to get access to over 5000 courses from lots of different universities, and increasingly also companies like IBM, Microsoft, Google and others. “Many don’t realise that we have Coursera for business, and that’s how we help companies train up employees.”

In 2019, they launched Coursera for campus for universities and have seen good uptake from the tertiary sector, including a partnership with Covenant University in Nigeria, which has been a great success.

Two of the country’s top institutions, UCT and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), are already in a solid partnership with Coursera.

Dr Chantelle Murray, Head: Human Resource Development Unit (HRDU) at Wits, said the global movement away from traditional contact-based training has been in motion for some years now.

“Aside from the impact of Covid-19 and the resultant (even more pressing) need to provide flexible, high-calibre and safe learning opportunities, the world of online learning opens doors to top-notch provider partners, and offers learners a vast spectrum of skills development and certification options from a diverse mix of leading organisations around the world,” she said.

Murray added that HRDU aims to provide staff with both the access and opportunity needed to stay on the cutting edge of priority skills.

“Therefore, partnering with Coursera, the world’s largest online learning platform, made sense. The statistics are impressive – more than 65million learners worldwide make use of Coursera, and they work with more than 200 of the world’s top University and industry partners to offer a vast menu of more than 7000 quality learning courses,” she said.

Murray said within the context of staff development, HRDU would continue sourcing local expertise for staff development but complement this with international expertise sourced through Coursera.

“Coursera has a strong portfolio of courses related to data science, machine learning, coding, and other 4IR skills – and yes, that was also a key factor in selecting Coursera as our partner going forward.”

Elijah Moholola, spokesperson for the UCT, said it also partners with Coursera to host courses created by UCT academics for public open enrolment. There are 19 courses created by UCT currently hosted on Coursera and UCT does not pay Coursera to secure licences for students and staff to take courses.

He said Coursera-like courses were often referred to as Massive Open Online Courses (Moocs). The UCT Moocs project set out in 2014 to create a portfolio of open online courses that would reach a global audience and showcase the work of the university.

In recent years, Moholola said Coursera introduced programmes to support new modes of remote teaching for universities. The Coursera platform was particularly responsive, offering universities access to parts of their portfolio of courses, and in some cases waiving the usual certificate fees for students through the Coursera Coronavirus Response Programme.

“As part of this Coursera initiative, one of the UCT Mooc’s GSB’s Bertha Centre “Becoming a Changemaker” proved especially popular, gaining more than 50 000 new enrolments in 2020 from around the world. The Bertha Centre organised an international webinar on “Social Innovation during the Covid-19 pandemic’ in May 2020. This is an example of how UCT Moocs were used in their intended role of promoting UCT teaching,” he said.

University of Johannesburg, led by Professor Tshilidzi Marwala, a vice-chancellor synonymous with the 4IR, has also aligned with Coursera. But their media office failed to respond to an email enquiry on the matter.