China Surges Past India as Largest Overseas Market for Coursera
Coursera becomes the first open online education provider to cross one million learners in China.
India is Coursera’s largest market outside of the US with over 700k learners
– Cousera Blog, Nov 2014
In a blog post last week Coursera announced that China became its largest market outside of the US, taking over the title that previously belonged to India.
Coursera also reached the milestone of becoming the first open online education provider to cross one million learners in China. At the time of this writing, Coursera has more than 14 million registered users on their platform.
"China is our fastest growing market, then India" – Coursera's @juliastiglitz at #SXSWedu #educatetheworld #learnersfirst
— Coursera (@coursera) March 11, 2015
Those these figures are still a far cry from the early hype & goal of “educating the world”, it is certainly a positive trend, and also fitting that China, and India, the world’s two most populous countries, are proportionally represented in Coursera’s international audience of learners.
AliPay Integration
Coinciding with this this announcement, Coursera announced an integration with AliPay, a third-party payment platform. AliPay, launched by Jack Ma’s Alibaba in 2004 is similar to PayPal, Stripe, etc., and is widely used throughout China.
Previously Chinese learners could only pay for Coursera’s Verified Certificates via an International credit card. According to Coursera, some Chinese learners resorted to borrowing credit cards from their friends abroad. Thus, the move to integrate with AliPay is clearly a win-win for both Coursera and the Chinese learners.
