Coursera, the leading provider of massive open online courses (MOOCs), has partnered with Chegg to offer students online textbooks to aid them in the learning experience, according to a PR Newswire release.
Chegg is an online student hub that connects millions of students to online tools they can use to help with their classes. The Chegg partnership will enable Coursera to offer eTextbooks from many publishers, including Cengage, Macmillan Higher Education, Oxford University Press and SAGE. According to the company press release, students will have free partial access to online textbooks in certain Coursera courses, with the option of purchasing the full version of the eTextbook for continued learning after the course.
Coursera is already the leader in offering free online courses to students all over the world in several languages. But the company has offered students very little in terms of reading content. Before this partnership, professors using the Coursera platform have been limited to book recommendations and small excerpts from the web to supplement video learning content.
In the release, Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera, says the new partnership will allow Coursera to give students access to a vast collection of learning materials, bolstering Coursera’s mission goal of “learning without limits.” The gigantic addition to online learning materials gives students an impressive upgrade to their educational experience in the free MOOCs.
Publishers of online content are willing to offer free access to online textbooks for Coursera students as part of a complex marketing effort to learn more about their readers and make additional sales to students after the courses, as well. Michael Hansen, CEO of Cengage Learning, calls it a “strategic partnership” designed to “help publishers to better understand how students use digital materials to inform future product development.”
Coursera students will have at least partial access to eTextbooks in some of their courses using Chegg’s eReader throughout the duration of each course. But they will have to purchase the eTextbooks if they want to continue using them for personal study. Students can purchase the eTextbooks through Chegg’s platform and Coursera will receive a portion of the purchase.
Coursera is currently enrolling 1.45 million students per month in its dozens of class offerings. Founded in April 2012, its partnership with Chegg represents the first time in its history it will offer online textbooks for students.
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