Coursera, an online learning application, has introduced CourseMatch, an artificial intelligence tool necessary for matching campus classes with the course catalogs in the Coursera’s catalog. The initiative is part of the company’s program on coronavirus response that was started in March 2020.
Coursera launched CourseMatch to assist learning in the universities as governments continue to escalate the lockdown measure to curb COVID-19 spread. As universities provide online learning, there is a need for a tool that assists in the identification of courses on the Coursera app that almost matches the on-campus catalog.
The underlying problem is extensive as it involves millions of campus courses and thousands of universities. Coursematch helps simplify the process and faculties can go online without necessarily employing human curation.
CourseMatch to ease online learning for 50 million students
Over 91,000 schools in the United States have been closed down since March 25th with an overall effect on approximately 50 million students. The majority of these institutions have similar challenges on Coursera that the course match is bound to solve. One of the problems that will be solved includes the provision of guidelines to students at different academic levels.
CourseMatch allows courses written in English and 50 other international languages in translation and subtitles format. The application uses natural language methods in embedded words to retrieve Coursera courses that are similar in semantic to the courses that are offered by each campus.
The algorithms on Coursera considers the title of the course from its public catalog alongside students learning objectives. The corpus of the full text is considered by the courses on Coursera including titles and descriptions as well as the students’ exams and assignments.
CourseMatch outlines up to 5 Coursera courses
In the end, CourseMatch outlines five of the relevant Coursera courses with the corresponding scores which are normalized by the learning institutions. Higher scores mean that the matches on CourseMatch are strong and relevant to the students’ needs. According to Coursera, CourseMatch has 2.6 million curricula across the 1800 learning institutions in Spain and India.
According to Glassberg Sands, the company’s goal is to assist universities and colleges to adopt more rapidly with ease as soon as possible. CourseMatch is an upgrade to Coursera already existing tools with an aim of supplementing the methods involved in offering online courses. Departments can tap into the 3,600 programs on Coursera under predetermined domains like engineering, law, or health.
Coursera has stated that by March 12, more than 3000 universities and colleges had activated on Coursera for their customized learning programs.
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