Sep 01, 2016 09:09 AM EDT By Emily Marks, UniversityHerald Reporter

Coursera is one of the top online education platforms today. It is founded by Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng.

Coursera aims to make education attainable by the masses. It is now possible to get a Stanford-quality course for free. Each course has two components. First is when education is moved away from the constraints of a classroom and its content is intentionally formatted and designed for online use. Second is making sure that students practice with the material to fully understand the concept.

This time, Coursera is reaching more students through a new initiative called Coursera for Business. The Next Web reported that the online education platform has already partnered with BNY Mellon, Boston Consulting Group, L'Oreal and Axis Bank to let their employees learn remotely. The companies are also able to choose which disciplines should be made available to their employees.

"We believe in learning for all, and our goal is to touch 100% of L'Oréal's employees every year whether they work in our corporate offices or one of our factories," Laurent Reich, L'Oréal's Governance and Digital Learning Director, said. "In order to achieve that, we aim for 50% of an employee's development time to happen through digital or self-directed learning. We love that the Coursera platform will allow us to provide a breadth of high quality programs and a learning experience that our employees can self-select into to drive their own personal development."

One of Coursera's key features is that it lets users start with one course. If they want to learn more, students can broaden their scope and earn an accredited degree or specialization that is co-branded by a university.

Coursera for Business allows companies to track their employees' progress. It also has centralized billing and group communication features, which is great for large businesses. Aside from tracking tools, reporting is also made easier so that companies can measure the impact that a course has on an employee's career development.

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