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 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 tie-ups with Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, Duke University, among 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 they will keep 'affordability' of Indian students in mind.

S Vaitheeswaran, MD and CEO, Manipal Global Education, told BusinessLine that as 50 per cent of Indian managerial people need to be reskilled, due to the changing business requirements, and the partnership with Coursera is a step towards that direction.

This partnership will offer specialisations such as "data sciences from John Hopkins or an Emory university'' instead of doing a generic course on data sciences.

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.

Another reason for this partnerhip has to do with the changing learning requirements of users.

"Some students can finish a course in 3 months and others may take longer time so it no longer makes sense to have a course designed for a specific timeframe like in the past," said Gopal Devanahalli, Senior VP, Manipal Global Education Services.

Additionally, Manipal University is also planning to introduce Coursera courses as part of its curriculum.

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