Manipal Global Education Services, a part of the Manipal Group has partnered with Coursera, an online education company, to offer its specialisation and certification programmes.

As a part of this tie-up, around 1.8 million students of Manipal Global Education will get access to specific online educational study material from Coursera, which has tieups with Stanford, Duke University amongst others. Coursera is backed by VC firms like Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, New Enterprise Associates, and has partnerships with 145 universities globally.

Students will get access to their learning material through a combination of classroom and online systems. Both the companies are still working on the prices of these courses but said that it will keep ‘affordability’ of Indian students in mind.

Talking to BusinessLine , S Vaitheeswaran, MD and CEO of Manipal Global Education, said that as 50 per cent of Indian managerial people need to be re-skilled due to the changing business requirements, the partnership with Coursera is a step towards that direction. This partnership will offer specialisations such as “data sciences” from a particular university instead of a generic course.

Initially, 60 specialisations will be offered by Coursera to Manipal, pointed out Nikhil Sinha, Chief Business Officer, Coursera, adding that subjects such as Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) are some such areas which it will kick off.