Top French Institutions ESSEC and Sciences Po Partner With Coursera

PARIS, FRANCE--(Marketwired - Dec 10, 2014) - Today, Coursera, the online education provider, announced partnerships with ESSEC Business School and Sciences Po. As two of France's most respected institutions, these new partners will help expand Coursera's French and English course offerings in the subjects of business and social sciences to benefit more than 10 million Coursera learners worldwide.

ESSEC and Sciences Po join Coursera's existing French partners École Centrale Paris, École Normale Supérieure, École Polytechnique and HEC Paris, as well as several Swiss universities, to offer a total of 24 courses taught in French. These partnerships reinforce Coursera's commitment to bringing universal access to the world's best education, especially to the 380 million French speakers around the world.

"We are enthusiastic to partner with France's top educational institutions to help make their knowledge accessible to millions of French speakers worldwide," said Coursera's Co-Founder and President Daphne Koller, who will be speaking on the power of online education at LeWeb in Paris on December 11th. "We see a tremendous opportunity to provide people in France and other French speaking regions of the world with access to top quality education."

Sciences Po, one of the world's leading institutions in social sciences, is developing three initial courses that will launch between March and September of next year: "Espace Mondial" by Professor Bertrand Badie, "Scientific Humanities" by Professor Bruno Latour and "Cities are Back in Town" by Professor Patrick Le Gales. Sciences Po has educated decision-makers in the public and private sectors for over 140 years, including the past five French presidents, and will bring its multidisciplinary, multilingual and outward looking education to learners around the world.

"Sciences Po is an international university with a pioneering role in enrolling students from all walks of life, and today, our community is defined by its unique multiculturalism and social diversity," said Frédéric Mion, President of Sciences Po. "With Coursera, we have the wonderful opportunity to deploy this policy of audience diversification online, and to widen our international community. While Coursera facilitates the wide scale distribution of our MOOCs, we have, as an institution of higher education, the responsibility to share our knowledge and to make it accessible to all. The MOOCs that we propose on Coursera were designed to privilege a collaborative and participative approach, an indispensable element for their success."

ESSEC, a world-class business school with expertise in leadership and management training, launched its first course earlier this fall, "The Future of Decision," featuring the renowned French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin as well as a dozen ESSEC professors. The school plans to create several additional courses for Coursera over the next year.

"ESSEC is taking pride in the first MOOC it has launched with Coursera," said Jean-Michel Blanquer, President of ESSEC. "Such a partnership has indeed enabled the teaching of Edgar Morin, as well as our professors' analysis, to be diffused on a large scale. With our MOOC, in the end, it is the singularity of our vision, built on creating and transmitting leading-edge expertise, on interdisciplinary teaching, and on a continuous dialogue between management, technology and society, that we are willing to share with as many as possible. Our partnership with Coursera not only allowed us to reach such goal, but it also helped create a real knowledge community with those who took our MOOC."

Today's news follows Coursera's recently announced partnerships with top universities in countries like India and Brazil, where high quality online education content is in high demand. Coursera's Verified Certificates and Specializations credentials are rapidly gaining popularity and recognition around the world as a means of acquiring and demonstrating knowledge and skills needed to succeed in the competitive global economy. In fact, the most popular courses among French learners are those in computer science, engineering and finance, all subjects that link directly to marketable career skills.

Go here to find all of Coursera's courses offered by French institutions, including ESSEC and Sciences Po.

About Coursera:
Coursera's mission is to provide universal access to the world's best education. Coursera partners with more than 100 of the world's top universities and education institutions to offer online courses in a wide range of the most current disciplines for anyone to take, for free. More than 10 million learners globally have come to Coursera to gain knowledge and skills from the world's most respected academic experts and earn Verified Certificates to advance their lives, careers, and communities.

For more information, visit www.coursera.org.