Greg Hart of Coursera on Why Skills Are the New Atomic Unit of Education

Greg Hart is the CEO of Coursera, bringing 25+ years of leadership and technology innovation from Amazon, where he helped develop Alexa and expand Prime Video globally. At Coursera, he leads the company’s mission to make learning more engaging, skills-focused, and accessible worldwide.

💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:

1. Why skills are becoming the “atomic unit” of modern education.
2. How AI is reshaping learning experiences on Coursera.
3. The role of partnerships with universities and industry in scaling education.
4. Strategies for making learning modular, engaging, and career-relevant.
5. The importance of lifelong learning and continuous reinvention.

✨ Episode Highlights:

[00:03:53] Why Greg joined Coursera: combining mission, growth, and impact for learners.
[00:04:14] Lessons from Amazon: using AI and customer focus to enhance learning experiences.
[00:07:44] The shift to skills-focused learning: mapping courses to career outcomes.
[00:13:06] AI in education: personalized tutors, course builders, and interactive learning.
[00:14:08] The power of partnerships: connecting universities, industry, and marketplaces like Udemy.
[00:17:56] Skills as the new atomic unit: modular learning for accessibility and relevance.
[00:21:23] Key challenges for Coursera: moving fast enough to meet learner and industry needs.
[00:24:03] Greg’s advice: be a lifelong learner and continually reinvent yourself.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Greg Hart: Education is a content industry. At the end of the day, you are delivering content to an audience. We happen to do that online, but teachers in a classroom are still delivering content to their students in that classroom. So you wanna make sure that that content is really engaging. My personal belief, and I said this to my leadership team in my first week, is we need to keep evolving the educational experience to make it both ever more engaging for our learners, but also.

Ever more effective for our learners at helping them to achieve the outcomes that they want.

[00:00:38] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders. 

[00:00:54] Ben Kornell: Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also our event.

Calendar and to go deeper. Check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod.

Hello, EdTech insider listeners, we have a true pleasure today. Greg Hart, the new Coursera, CEO, and President as of February, 2025. Has joined us here for EdTech Insiders. Welcome, Greg. 

[00:01:31] Greg Hart: Thank you very much, Ben. It is a pleasure to be here with you and all of your listeners. 

[00:01:36] Ben Kornell: I know that it may not seem new to you.

I mean, a year in the role can feel like a lifetime in EdTech, we know, but you're bringing 25 plus years of leadership and technology driven innovation at Amazon. You were technical advisor to Jeff. And you led the development of Alexa Echo and oversaw prime video's, global expansion. I'm really curious, like what was the calling to join Coursera when you were starting to explore this?

What made things click for you? 

[00:02:05] Greg Hart: To be honest, I hadn't necessarily targeted the ed tech space. I was looking for a role that had a couple key characteristics. One, I was targeting becoming a CEO as a logical sort of next step in my career progression. I wanted that. To be ideally at a company that was not a turnaround because I wanted to find something that was much more focused on growth.

I really enjoy being in growth companies. When the Coursera opportunity came up, I was really intrigued for a couple different reasons. One, the mission is unbelievably appealing. So my father is a surgeon. My mother is a school psychologist, and so both of my parents, a core part of their being and their career is helping other people in obviously very different ways in terms of their professions, but that was really the heart of their careers.

That hadn't been a part of my career. I mean, there were tangential ways in which things I'd done in the past had helped people. You know, certainly Alexa has elements that are incredibly helpful for people who might struggle with using technology in other forms, but mainly it had been about delivering more value for.

For customers, helping businesses perform better, et cetera. And so the combination of the mission that Coursera had and the opportunity that I saw to really help the business perform better and grow better, and by doing that, deliver more value to learners, deliver more value for our university partners, and deliver more value to our enterprise customers.

That combination was incredibly compelling and so I just thought this would be. A really amazing coda to my career as an operator. I felt like this would be and will be my last full-time operating role in my career, and that was a really appealing end to my career journey. So those were a few of the things that resonated.

[00:03:53] Ben Kornell: It's incredibly fascinating, and also just your diverse experiences outside of education, bringing those things in at a time of such tremendous opportunity and change. From your experience, scaling products like Alexa and Prime Video, what parallels do you see in bringing breakthrough AI capabilities into the learning experience on Coursera?

[00:04:14] Greg Hart: Great question. So I see a lot of things that I've done in my past and had exposure to in my past that are relevant for what Coursera is trying to accomplish. First and foremost, I think one of the things that Amazon certainly prided itself on when I was there, and I think still does, is focus on the customer and delivering value for the customer.

And in the case of Coursera. We have multiple different customer sets. We have, of course, at our heart, our learners as our customers, but then we also have a customer set of all of our university industry partners, the professors and the industry instructors who create the content that our learners engage with.

And then of course, we have our enterprise customers, the businesses, the governments, and the universities that use Coursera as a tool with. Their employees or citizens or students and faculty. And so delivering more value to all of them certainly is something that I was very focused on from the day that I joined.

And a lot of the discussions that I had with my leadership team in my very first week were about how do we do a better job of delivering value to each of our different core customer sets. Obviously, some of the things that I did at Amazon relied deeply on ai. So Alexa is a AI centric product. It would not exist without ai.

Of course, we didn't call that generative AI at the time. It was built off of older machine learning technologies and deep neural networks, et cetera. But it wasn't the gen AI that we know today through Chat, GPT and others. And then I think there's some really strong parallels from my time in Prime video.

That is a content business. Education is a content industry. At the end of the day, you are delivering content to an audience. We happen to do that online, but teachers in a classroom are still delivering content to their students in that classroom. So you wanna make sure that that content is really engaging.

My personal belief, and I said this to my leadership team in my first week, is we need to keep evolving the educational experience to make it both ever more engaging. For our learners, but also ever more effective for our learners at helping them to achieve the outcomes that they want. And my belief is that that really has to center more and more around skills.

86% of the learners who come to Coursera are coming to advance their careers. They want to understand what are the skills that they need to have to grow their careers either to. Increase their performance in their current job to help them get a promotion to the next stage in their current career, or to switch jobs to enter a new field.

And that is all centered around skills. And so increasingly everything that we are doing at Coursera is how do we map. Courses that deliver skills to learners who are looking for those skills and how do we keep doing a better job of doing that? And so there's a lot of commonality from my Prime video experience in terms of how do you help somebody find the right content for them.

Obviously, learning is not meant to entertain. My personal belief is that entertainment is an important aspect of learning. Meaning you wanna make the experience interesting and engaging, and that is a form of an entertainment, uh, very different obviously, than watching a big blockbuster movie or TV show.

But at its core, it needs to be engaging, it needs to capture the audience, and it needs to drive them to want to continue, and in our case, to continue learning, to continue to gain that skill. 

[00:07:44] Ben Kornell: I think as you talk about what does the learning experience need to look like, really learner expectations have shifted over time to being something that's one directional to engaging multi-directional.

And then also with advent of ai, it's both the subjects and the objects of the equation with regards to courses. Coming back to what you talked about, Coursera has been around. Has really been the epitome of educational innovation over the last decade, but now this kind of skills world, what the skills are and what skills one needs in a job and when one needs to get it, it's basically you need to be learning all the time and updating your skills.

How much has that really changed your thinking about the roadmap? Because. If you're building towards static outcomes and static skills, that's one thing. But when it's in this dynamic world where the skill scorecard, it's constantly shifting, how does that affect how you build? 

[00:08:41] Greg Hart: That's a fantastic question, and I think that is one of the largest challenges that both every individual learner and person in the world faces.

Like given the pace at which skills are evolving, how do you keep up with that? Right. So it's a massive challenge. It's also a huge challenge, obviously, for companies. They're trying to figure out, okay, we have this workforce. How do we upskill them and re-skill them to ensure that they are conversant with the very latest technologies, recognizing that those technologies are changing literally every week in some cases, and make sure that they're leveraging those technologies as effectively as possible to deliver value for whatever their function is within that company.

I think a couple things. Number one, obviously I think that ai, like if you think about the most. Engaging educational experience that you had in a physical classroom? My hypothesis is that most people, if they were fortunate enough to have had this experience, would probably say it was a relatively small classroom.

The professor was. Amazing. Not just in terms of their knowledge of the subject matter, but also in terms of the way that they taught it and the way that they engaged with their students, and that that classroom was also an interactive one. It wasn't just a lecture. I mean, there are some amazing lecturers who are really funny and really engaging.

Oftentimes, in my experience, at least some of the best lectures, it's not just one-way traffic. It is two-way. Right? And obviously the smaller the classroom, the more readily it lends itself to a two-way conversation across the students. With ai, we now have the ability. To start to deliver an experience that can start to look like that really small classroom with an amazing instructor, while of course still remaining true to the pedagogical goals of the instructor.

And so obviously Coursera grew out of for Stanford and Andrew and Daphne, but then just the best universities from around the US and then around the world. And they are of course still central to our offering. And then we've augmented that over time with industry partners, you know, whether that's Google or Microsoft.

SIBM, Adobe Anthropic, and all of those partnerships are all aiming to do the same thing that I think Andrew and Daphne had, which is how do we take something that we've spent a lot of time developing and bring it to a much broader audience Now, I think that the challenge is. Not just about access and bringing it to that broader audience.

'cause I think we've checked that box. We are available effectively around the world to learners. But how do we do that in a way that takes advantage of AI and also recognize to the point you made earlier. AI is the subject and the object here, right? It is both the thing that people wanna learn about the most on Coursera right now, and I would say just broadly in the world right now, and we've seen the pace of enrollments and AI courses skyrocket over the last year.

You know the stat that I'm sure you've heard before, Ben, is 14 enrollments per minute and AI related content on Coursera last year, and that was up from eight the prior year and one in 2023. So unbelievable amount of interest, but it's also a phenomenal tool. That we can use to improve the learning experience and much to Coursera's credit, we started doing that very shortly after the launch of chat GPT in late November of 2022.

We rolled out a few advances that are still a core part of our offering and that we continue to improve. So Coach, which is our AI tutor that sort of sits alongside every class, enables people to. Ask questions, check on things that they're not sure of. Revisit older material, help them prep for upcoming quizzes or exams, et cetera.

Course Builder, our AI driven facility for helping instructors create content, and then new advances like dialogues and role play that start to really make that learning experience more and more interactive. My perspective is that we need to stay at the forefront of advances in AI technology, and that's a huge focus for our internal product and development teams, and really be innovating on how we deliver that learning experience so that we can deliver better outcomes for our learners, help them be more engaged, help them find the right course for the skills that they're trying to achieve, help them master those skills.

Verify their mastery of those skills through assessments, and then be able to represent that to either their employer or out in the workforce more broadly. And so we will absolutely continue to invest along that whole thread. 

[00:13:06] Ben Kornell: You know what's so exciting about it is this reminds me of my original conversations with Andrew and Julius Stig, who's a Stanford TSB classmate of mine.

Like in the early days, this was the dream, and there's a component where the technology is meeting the moment. And this kind of market dynamics where there's a global student community and there's a global community of education resources. But one of the things that I've been most surprised about is how well Coursera has done with partnerships.

And since you've arrived, there's been this incredible drumbeat of partnerships that you've announced. You managed to be friends with OpenAI and Anthropic. You've got the Udemy acquisition. All the best universities seem to be excited and thrilled to partner with Coursera. Can you talk a little bit about the partnership strategy rather than trying to build everything yourself?

It's almost been like coursera's, the connective tissue of these different communities together. How does that play into your strategy and your thinking? 

[00:14:08] Greg Hart: Well, I think first and foremost, it starts from our very foundation, right where we grew, literally grew out of higher education. We grew out of Stanford and out of Andrew and Daphne's courses, and then immediately following that initial MOOC that was so successful that they started.

You know, decided to start a company Coursera, then obviously engaged with, you know, Yale and Penn and, uh, UVA and Michigan and you know, a host of other top tier US universities. And obviously since then we've expanded very broadly. I think our history of expanding to industry partners grew out of the same recognition.

Like, look, if we want to have. The best way for people around the world to improve their lives through access to the best education. Not all of that education resides within an ivory tower. Obviously, you have phenomenal professors coming from top tier universities. You also have a lot of great content that's being created out there in the world, particularly in technology fields at a faster clip.

And so, you know, our expansion to partnerships with industry partners was born out of a recognition of that and the fact that we really wanted to augment the fantastic curricula that we had coming from higher education. With partnerships with, you know, the likes of Google and then you know, Microsoft and Amazon, et cetera.

And more recently, obviously with OpenAI and Anthropic. And then Udemy, I would say is actually very much in keeping with the natural arc of that story. Content is the engine of our business and we rely on phenomenal instructors and university and industry partners to create the fuel for that engine.

Udemy has taken historically a very different approach where we have a curated approach to it. You know, with amazing university industry partners. They have a open marketplace approach to it with their, you know, phenomenal range of subject matter experts. They have 85. Thousand different instructors creating content for their audience.

And that content has real value in a couple different ways. One, it's, it's often being created at a faster pace. You know, because for many of these instructors on their marketplace, it is their livelihood. This is everything that they do. And so they're effectively like individual entrepreneurs, and Udemy is a core part of that profession for them.

And so they're creating content very rapidly. Often it is very focused on, you know, the latest advances in technology, whether that's AI or you know, different coding languages, et cetera, networking, cybersecurity, et cetera. They also have a great business in helping people prep for test certifications. 

[00:16:45] Ben Kornell: As a corporate Udemy customer, I can say like there's something interesting about the Atomic unit of learning that has gone through this transformation where it was locked in this four year, you know, box that you had to complete to get a degree.

And Coursera for many, many people was the first one to break that unit up into the course as the unit. But then Udemy actually brought it even to the skills level. And so now you kind of cross both of these vectors, you're able to kind of stack your skill progression, whether it's through really highly curated Coursera courses or through this marketplace of Udemy.

Everyone, we, we had Michael Horn on the pod to talk about this. We were just really excited about, you know, the coming to fruition of the original vision of breaking down these. Old legacy, slow moving dinosaur models. I think the thing that surprised us most is that actually everyone feels like they're on this burning platform and they're all diving in.

Universities, companies, technology partners, they're like, okay, we're in for the journey. Kudos to you and navigating that complex. 

[00:17:56] Greg Hart: First of all, thank you. It is interesting that you used, you know, skills as the Atomic unit. In my first week at Coursera, one of the conversations I was having with Marni Baker Stein and our leadership team was, you know, historically the course has been the atomic unit, sort of, of Coursera's offering.

I said, I really think that needs to evolve. To having skills. Yeah. In the atomic unit of the platform, because a course can deliver multiple different skills. 

[00:18:22] Ben Kornell: We weren't ready to go to the skills unit yet, until Coursera broke it down to the course, and then that's when we realized we could bring it to the skills.

And then of course, the technology now has this great component of allowing, you know, this is what AI is good at, is stitching together pieces into a data table that is the student's data table to say, okay. We've co-constructed with a student, a learning path that gets them the skills that they need to be successful in career and in life.

[00:18:52] Greg Hart: I think that that general theme of learning not being something that only happens primarily from a life perspective during a certain period of your life in a certain physical environment, to one where, yes, of course there's still massive value in, you know, not just kid to 12 education, but also obviously higher education and getting a degree, but then also continuing to augment that.

Not just with what you learn, you know, literally on the job, but also through ongoing skilling efforts that you have. Whether that's through Coursera, through other platforms, I think is really increasingly important in today's world. Just given the pace of technological change you have. To you owe it to yourself and to your career.

To stay as current as possible and to continue to learn about the latest technologies. And if it's a big, daunting effort to do that, it's gonna be really hard. It's not gonna be good for the learner, and it's not gonna be easy for companies or institutions that are offering just a one size fits all.

Really big commitment of time. And so I think Coursera saw in the early response that breaking that into the course level made it much more accessible to a much broader audience, both geographically but then also generationally. And then. The further you break it down, I think the more accessible it becomes and the more modular it becomes.

And so one of the big focuses that we have is making learning really modular and skills focused so that it's much easier for any given learner to figure out the right skill that they need to learn. And it's not this massive time commitment. They can get it at their pace and in a more bite-sized way.

[00:20:32] Ben Kornell: Well, I think so much of this vision has existed in our space for a while. The ability also to assess those skills. And like I was part of a charter school where we do performance tasks and performance assessments, but man, would we spend hours and hours per student grading. And now there's also so many ways that the learning can lead to real concrete projects that are relevant in the real world that are not some fiction of a professor, but actually often deliverable in somebody's work environment and can get assessed for credit.

There's some sort of formula here where it's the vision and then the timing have really intersected well. I guess the question I wonder about is what keeps you up at night? Given all this forward momentum, what are the biggest headwinds or the biggest challenges, especially given Coursera's global reach now?

[00:21:23] Greg Hart: The thing that I worry about most is can we move fast enough to recognize the opportunity and fend off the challenges that we face? And so the opportunity is given the pace of technological change and what AI is doing to literally every single profession around the world, can we rise to the moment and help learners?

And people around the world be as well prepared to deal with that unbelievable transformation as possible, and not just to deal with it, but really to capitalize on it and to really become masters of, you know, their destiny instead of just being subject to this massive sort of industrial technological change that's unfolding.

Then the challenge is. Can we move quickly enough to actually do that and do that in a way that minimizes the risk that we are also disintermediated. Every technological change creates new companies that succeed and rise to the top that weren't there before. And there's another set of companies that sort of fall by the wayside 'cause they're not able to adapt quickly enough.

So the same thing that. Is true. I think for every individual in the world right now, can you adapt quickly enough? It's true for every company, and of course there is no different from that perspective. We may or may not recognize it more than other countries do because of this particular space that we're in, but we still have the same challenge of execution.

And so the thing that I always preach with my leaders is how do we move faster to deliver more value to every single constituent in our value chain? 

[00:22:55] Ben Kornell: I mean, 20 years ago there was a revolution in open education resources where the idea was that content could be free and universal. And my estimation at that time was the value of content is approaching zero.

This is all about engagement and platforms, and boy was I wrong, that actually content is what holds the most value, especially in an AI slop world like finding. Differentiated content, and it seems like that's where Coursera's made all the right moves in investing really over the last, you know, 15 years since its founding.

Thanks so much, Greg, for joining us today here at EdTech Insiders. If you had one word of advice for our entrepreneurial community that's working in education and technology, any advice that you, you would drop for our community? 

[00:23:44] Greg Hart: Well, it might be similar to the advice that I was sort of just giving to sort of people around the world, like be a lifelong learner and reinvent yourself continuously.

I think that implies or applies rather to individuals, but it also applies to entrepreneurs and to companies. Be willing to reinvent yourself because if you don't, somebody else will for you. 

[00:24:03] Ben Kornell: I would just add institutions to that. Some of our listeners are 

[00:24:06] Greg Hart: absolutely 

[00:24:06] Ben Kornell: in charge of a K 12 school or a university.

This is the moment that you've been waiting for to reinvent yourself. And for learning to be relevant you, you have to. So 

[00:24:17] Greg Hart: Absolutely. And the cost of reinvention is lower than ever before with the technology that we now all have access to. 

[00:24:24] Ben Kornell: I mean, I could go on for hours. This has been such a great conversation, Greg.

Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for all you do at Coursera, and thanks for joining EdTech Insiders today. 

[00:24:34] Greg Hart: Thank you so much, Ben. Had a fantastic time. Really appreciate it. 

[00:24:38] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community.

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