Bill Gates proclaimed that “content is king” as early as 1996 but most global technology companies have only more recently taken this maxim to heart.
The likes of Apple and Amazon have moved massively into content creation in recent years, investing heavily to serve their ever-more ambitious streaming platforms.
Greg Hart, a veteran of these content wars who oversaw Amazon Prime Video’s global expansion, has now set his sights on the world of higher education as the new chief executive of edtech firm Coursera.
But he doesn’t see the two sectors as being miles apart. “Prime Video is a content business,” he said. “We are also a content business.”
Hart joined Amazon as a young trainee in 1997 and worked at the company until 2020, rising to become technical adviser to founder Jeff Bezos and overseeing the development of Alexa as well as his work on Prime Video.
He told Times Higher Education his experience at Amazon has shaped one of his key strategic priorities for the company: product innovation.
This drive inspired the creation of a partnership with ChatGPT earlier this year, as well as the development of a series of AI-powered tools, including its “Coach” programme which acts as an AI personal assistant.
There is a significant opportunity for greater technological innovation in the higher education space, Hart said, and he believes Coursera is ready to take on the opportunity on behalf of the sector.
Before beginning the role, “I had the perception that this space was really ripe for innovation. In many other industries, you have clear, established leaders who are clearly out-innovating everybody else.
“I think Coursera has been probably one of the leading innovators in this space, but it’s still a very, very fragmented space where you haven’t had the level of impact that I would have thought you would have had.”
His words echo premonitions from the original wave of “massive open online courses” (Moocs), which Coursera was part of, and some believed had the capacity to disrupt the higher education model.
The company has generally fared better than many of its original competitors that have scaled back operations in recent years. In contrast Coursera saw its gross profit increase by 10 per cent this year as it has expanded into skills and work-based learning.
Universities are not “immediately engineered to move quickly”, and this is where Hart sees Coursera’s opportunity for growth. He sees the company as now a “partner” to the sector, rather than something in competition with it.
“There’s a real opportunity for us to help universities be more nimble and faster moving because we can do a little bit of that for them…[Universities] don’t necessarily have the budget to invest, which is why we’re investing sort of on their behalf in creating a really engaging learning experience.”
A significant part of Coursera’s success in the past year has focused on its expansion of AI courses and it is now seeing 14 enrolments per minute to its generative artificial intelligence-related courses. This is up from eight per minute last year, and Hart explained that they are the provider’s most in-demand content and have been its fastest-growing.
The company’s existence in both the business, tech and innovation world as well as the higher education sector means it “has a foot in all camps”. While Donald Trump’s administration has launched constant attacks on the US’ universities, Coursera has generally been unaffected, and Hart believes the company “aligns” with the administration’s focus on “skills and outcomes”.
“People went to, and still go to, university, not just for the sake of learning but to prepare themselves for a career,” he said. He noted that 86 per cent of Coursera’s users are looking to develop skills to advance their career and said “there is a gap between the skills that people have exited university with and the skills that the workforce is actually looking for, and we are very focused on helping to bridge that gap”.
Regardless of people’s political beliefs, “this really should be a relatively universal desire” he said. And this, Hart believes, is the future of online learning.
“The pace of technological change is so fast, it’s really important that people are continuously reskilling and upskilling themselves, because the skills that you need today are going to be insufficient for tomorrow…I think microcredentials and professional certificates will be the way that happens because they’re already a currency that basically, every constituent recognises the value of.”
juliette.rowsell
