Coursera Coach: Providing Essential Learner Support

By Mashrur Khan and Alexandra Urban

Coursera is dedicated to providing an exceptional online learning experience tailored to the individual needs of our learners. With this goal in mind, we created Coursera Coach, our AI-powered learning assistant rooted in pedagogical and tutoring best practices.

Coursera Coach offers interactive guidance to help learners master course concepts more effectively, test their skills, and receive real-time feedback. In fact, Coursera Coach has already helped more than one million learners stay on track and progress in their courses. Plus, recent data highlights how Coursera Coach is enhancing learning for groups that online platforms have traditionally underserved.

Our initial research has uncovered exciting trends for which groups of learners are engaging most with Coursera Coach. In particular, women demonstrated a statistically significant 11.1% higher likelihood of interacting with Coursera Coach, even after accounting for factors like education level and previous platform engagement.

This finding likely relates to how women face a higher level of unpaid responsibilities like home, family, and childcare, resulting in less time for learning (Allione & Stein, 2016; Perez, 2019; Urban, 2023). Coursera Coach allows for self-paced, on-demand interactions and helps learners, on average, to complete 11.6% more items per hour, making it a powerful tool to counteract time constraints.

In addition, our analysis found that learners who reported they are starting their career or in the midst of switching careers were significantly more likely to engage with Coursera Coach compared to learners with other goals. For instance, learners just starting their career were 39.8% more likely to send Coursera Coach a message than learners trying to advance their career.

Increased difficulty level due to gaps in prerequisite knowledge can hinder the persistence of women and learners new to the topic area (Grella & Meinel, 2016). Coursera Coach can help learners to identify and fill such content gaps through tailored explanations and examples.

For individuals brave enough to pursue a new professional path, Coursera Coach can be an invaluable asset - connecting course concepts to real-world job applications and offering personalized guidance through unfamiliar material. Having an AI tutor can boost confidence and persistence for those embarking on a new career journey.

Similarly, learners without a college degree or only a high school education were 10.8% more likely to use Coursera Coach after controlling for other demographic factors and the course subject. While striving to make online learning more accessible and empowering, we at Coursera need to better support this group of learners. Coursera Coach can provide supplemental academic support filling in gaps in prerequisite knowledge for those without higher education experience.

Plus, consistently lower confidence (Lambert, 2020), self-efficacy (Handoko et al., 2019), science identity, and sense of belonging (Walton et al., 2015) can all deter women or those with less formal education experience to continue in their learning. Coursera Coach's interactive practice can boost confidence by allowing risk-free questions, feedback, and reattempts, which may be especially beneficial to these learner groups.

The insights from this experiment underscore Coursera's commitment to delivering an inclusive and tailored online learning experience. As we continue evolving Coursera Coach's capabilities, we will leverage these findings to enhance how we serve different groups of learners to meet their unique needs and backgrounds.

Targeted support could mean more earned course certificates and more successful career transformations. Now everyone can have a personal tutor, just one click away.

We're already starting to see the positive impact of Coursera Coach driving more equitable engagement in online courses. This increased learning has a cascading effect, benefiting not only the individuals themselves but also their families and local communities.

Citations

Allione, G., & Stein, R. M. (2016). Mass attrition: An analysis of drop out from principles of microeconomics MOOC. Journal of Economic Education, 47(2), 174-186. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220485.2016.1146096

Grella, C., & Meinel, C. (2016). MOOCs as a promoter of gender diversity in STEM? The International Scientific Conference ELearning and Software for Education, 2(1), 516-521. https://doi.org/10.12753/2066-026X-16-164

Handoko, E., Gronseth, S. L., Mcneil, S. G., Bonk, C. J., & Robin, B. R. (2019). Goal setting and MOOC completion: A study on the role of self-regulated learning in student performance in massive open online courses. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 20(3), 39-58. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v20i4.4270

Lambert, S. R. (2020). Do MOOCs contribute to student equity and social inclusion? A systematic review 2014-18. Computers and Education, 145, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2019.103693

Perez, C. C. (2019). Invisible women: Data bias in a world designed for men. Abrams.

Urban, A.D. (2023). Closing the gender gap in STEM MOOCs through brief, novel interventions. In D. Guralnick, M.E. Auer, & A. Poce (Eds.), Creative approaches to technology-enhanced learning for the workplace and higher education. TLIC 2023 (pp. 589-605). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41637-8_48

Walton, G. M., Logel, C., Peach, J. M., Spencer, S. J., & Zanna, M. P. (2015). Two brief interventions to mitigate a "chilly climate" transform women's experience, relationships, and achievement in engineering. Journal of Educational Psychology, 107(2), 468-485. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037461

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