Coursera Launches CourseMatch: ML Solution That Matches School’s Course Catalogue To Coursera Courses

Coursera has launched CourseMatch, a machine learning solution that will automatically match the on-campus courses at colleges and universities across the globe with Coursera’s course catalogues.

According to a recent blog post by Coursera, it has been stated that last month, it launched the Coronavirus Response Initiative, where more than 2,600 colleges and universities across the globe have activated Coursera for Campus programs to take learning online and minimise student disruption. The blog stated — “And, as universities go live using our offering, they urgently need an easy solution to help identify courses on Coursera that most closely match each course in their on-campus catalogues.”

Coursera has activated more than 2,600 programs for colleges and universities around the world.

“Today, we are announcing CourseMatch, a machine learning solution that ingests a school’s on-campus course catalogue and matches each course to the most relevant courses in Coursera’s catalogue of 3,800 courses.”

According to the blog, CourseMatch can ingest catalogues in more than 100 languages and map them to the most relevant courses in English or any of the 50+ languages (translated and subtitled) available on Coursera. 

The institutions were given access until July 31, 2020, after which they could receive month-to-month extensions depending on the level of risk from the virus. Students who enrol on or before July 31 will be permitted access until Sept. 30, 2020.

CourseMatch uses natural language processing techniques to find the semantic similarity between Coursera and institutional courses — returning up to five courses on Coursera for each on-campus course along with a relevance score. 

The company claims that 2.6 million courses at 1,800 institutions have already been matched.

With the release today, universities will be able to access the matching feature directly and search their institution’s catalogue. If an institution’s catalogue is not yet among the 1,800 available, it can send the information directly to Coursera that will turn around results within 48 hours. 

Colleges and universities can access the solution directly at the website and search for their institution’s catalogue.

“Our goal is to help every college and university in the world move online as quickly and easily as possible. This is our first iteration of CourseMatch, and we look forward to refining our machine learning models based on your feedback. We invite you to try this solution in your efforts to scale programs online during the COVID-19 crisis quickly,” stated the blog.