With two AI bigwigs as founding members, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, Coursera could only take the turn towards artificial intelligence at full speed. Automatic translation of courses, personalized assistant… The American online training giant does not just train in AI, it uses it itself to train its students more effectively. While in Paris, its CEO, Jeff Maggioncalda, explains to us how digital technology is revolutionizing the way of training and the geography of recruitment.
L’Express: Online education has not yet massively converted people in Western Europe. Do certain countries have a different view of these new educational technologies?
Jeff Maggioncalda: Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East are adopting these tools much more quickly. In Kazakhstan, for example, which is a fairly landlocked country, the public authorities know that their human capital is one of their most important resources even if they are also very well endowed with minerals. The Ministry of Higher Education and Science has purchased hundreds of our course licenses and made them available to 25 local high schools and universities. In addition to their traditional courses with teachers, students also have access to courses designed by experts working in digital technology. One of their government agencies also uses our platform to train and help retrain people looking for work. Saudi Arabia has a similar approach with its national e-learning center.
What about the United States and China?
The United States is increasingly interested in online education. Joe Biden signed into law the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which aims to bring broadband to every rural area of the country. Worldwide, connectivity is becoming as important as electricity. Of course, it is not vital like water or food, but it becomes a basic necessity for several reasons. First, education. Having a well-educated population will increasingly involve using content from professors who come not just from one country, but from around the world. Additionally, connectivity plays an increasingly important role in our ability to do our jobs and seize economic opportunities. The Coursera service is not authorized in China, but several universities in the country make some of their courses available to the rest of the world on our platform. However, the country is developing online education a lot. This is quite logical given the size of the population and the number of their citizens living in rural areas. Online courses are a great way to provide quality training, even when people live in remote areas.
How can generative artificial intelligence transform education and continuing training?
It changes many parameters. One of the great advances it allows is the translation capacity it offers. Within Coursera, we used AI to translate 4,000 courses into 17 different languages. Previously, it cost $13,000 to have a course translated into one language. Doing it for 4,000 courses in 17 languages would have been a colossal expense. And it would have taken a lot longer. With AI, translating a course into a language costs $20. Translation is a very important tool for making learning accessible to everyone whose native English is not their first language.
AI also helps personalize learning. We have just launched Coach, a personalized educational assistant to whom students can ask any question. This AI tool knows everything in the course and what it means. This basis allows him to construct relevant answers and give details which are not necessarily covered as such in the course. We can also ask him for advice on identifying careers suited to our wishes and advice on courses to follow to navigate these paths. AI will make access to education more equal. It is also an interesting tool for evaluating certain works. On Coursera, we now offer it, but still offering Internet users the choice of requesting a human evaluation instead, or in addition.
If the population of a country like France does not quickly train in these new generative AI tools, what problems are they likely to face?
Learning to use AI leads to tremendous productivity gains. Harvard Business School and the Boston Consulting Group [BCG] just published a report which governments should read urgently. They analyzed the impact of generative AI on the production of BCG teams by separating them into three groups: one without access to these tools, the second with access but without prior training and the third with access and training to these tools. Result ? Among those who used generative AI, task speed increased by 25% and quality increased by more than 40%.
Businesses are not going to dictate how quickly they adapt, the global economy will. And the agility of companies will depend a lot on that of their employees and their ability to learn new things. Based on the discussions I had during my travels, it seems that more and more European employers are considering increasing their recruitment outside Europe, or have even started to do so, because they are having difficulty to find qualified people. In other geographic areas, they find profiles who are often less expensive, but also more determined to learn very quickly. Each government, whether that of Kazakhstan or France, must put in place adequate training programs. Countries that do not train will miss out on tremendous productivity gains.
In the European Union, the French population is only 12th in the digital skills ranking [rapport Desi 2022]. How to explain this mediocre position?
I cannot comment on the case of France in particular. But I observe that European countries are less interested in our professional certificates [NDLR : les cursus Coursera mis au point avec des entreprises telles que Google, IBM etc.] than countries like India or states in South Asia or Latin America. What does this tell us? Some will respond that the coverage and level of educational establishments are perhaps lower there, hence this greater interest. Maybe, sometimes, indeed. But in a world that is changing so quickly and to which schools must adapt, how long will it be before their graduates are better prepared for these jobs than those from traditional backgrounds? The economy is changing so quickly today that if you don’t understand the cloud computing, if you don’t have this basic digital knowledge, your business will not be successful.
Is technology breaking down the boundaries of recruitment, in your opinion?
Yes, the pandemic has changed things. Of course, birth rate is a factor. Where are the workers of tomorrow born? Increasingly in Africa and South Asia. Added to this is the increasingly rich online training offering. During the pandemic, many people in Africa and India started using these tools. Companies, for their part, realized during the confinements that their employees managed to work very effectively remotely. Moreover, teleworking around the world did not decrease at all after the pandemic, on the contrary, it continued to increase. Artificial intelligence has removed the last obstacle: language barriers. With teleworking, online training and AI-powered translation, the geographic boundaries of recruitment are shattering.
How to train for this new AI-boosted economy?
There are several categories of important skills. First, learn how to learn: how our brain works, what effective learning habits are. There are also all the skills related to data: understanding data, statistics, knowing how to read a graph… All of this becomes as important as knowing how to use a word processing tool. It is of course also important to have all the basic digital skills: knowing how to use digital communication tools and your computer. For managers, it makes sense, finally, to learn how to manage teams spread across the world, with people who may have very different cultures and opinions on major world events, particularly conflicts.
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