Coursera — one of the largest online education platforms in the world — announced its partnership with the prestigious Ain Shams University on Monday with the aim of accelerating the university's digital transformation processes, enhancing multidisciplinary education mechanisms, and supporting the professional development of faculty members. Ain Shams is the first public university in Egypt to fully incorporate the Coursera platform into its university curricula. This partnership will provide faculty, staff, and students with unlimited opportunities to access many of the courses and certificates available on the Coursera platform, which in turn, will provide them with entrepreneurial, digital, and technical skills in order to enhance the innovation process and effectively prepare them for the future. This partnership is the culmination of more than 18 months of cooperation between Coursera and the academic institution, in which the university participated during the month of March 2020 in the Coursera Campus Response Initiative, which was launched by Coursera to help universities and colleges around the world to continue distance education in light of the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. Thanks to this initiative, Ain Shams University students obtained more than 128,000 hours of learning via Coursera's platform and obtained more than 8,600 certificates between March 2020 and October 2021. Commenting on this partnership, Anthony Tattersall — Vice President of Coursera for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa — said: "Our previous partnership with Ain Shams University provided students with great and promising opportunities to develop their skills professionally and in a short time, and we are pleased today to expand our cooperation with this leading university in Egypt in its mission to train and qualify graduates to join the labour market and enable faculty members to provide distinguished education that keeps pace with the era of the digital economy." Ain Shams University will integrate many training courses from Coursera's platform into its curricula. A selection of more than 250 leading universities and institutions, including the Imperial College of London, École Polytechnique, IBM, and Microsoft will be participating in providing these courses. Through the platform, students will benefit from a world-class practical educational experience to acquire many unique skills, as the platform currently includes more than 5,200 courses, 2,100 mentorship projects, and more than 70 specialised certificates. With the Coursera for Campus Initiative, Ain Shams University will be able to access many unique features, including: ● The ability to use effective analytical tools to enable faculty members to track student performance in general and to collect direct data on the mechanisms for acquiring skills at the entire university level. ● Comparing the data of students with the data of other partners via the Coursera platform according to the region and the most important training areas, which contributes to identifying the weaknesses and points of excellence of Ain Shams University students. ● Organising content and learning paths to familiarise students with the optimal training courses that align with their professional requirements. ● Access to 25,000 professional certificates each year on a first-come-first-served basis, allowing students to obtain certifications that validate their skills to employers around the world. The partnership between Coursera and Ain Shams University comes in light of the rapid growth of Coursera's business in the Middle East and North Africa. It is worth noting that Coursera is currently supporting the development of the skills of 1.6m users in Egypt and more than 5.2m across the Middle East and North Africa, including more than 400,000 new users in the region that opened their accounts between July and September 2021.
