MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., April 27 (Bernama-BUSINESS WIRE) — Coursera, the world’s leading online learning platform, today announced the Coursera Workforce Recovery Initiative to help governments worldwide provide unemployed workers with free access to 3,800 online courses. The initiative’s goal is to help impacted workers develop the knowledge and skills to become re-employed. Federal, state, and local governments can sign up until September 30, 2020, and learners enrolled by then will have until the end of the year to complete the courses. The U.S. states of Illinois, Arizona, and Oklahoma, as well as the governments of Colombia, Costa Rica, Greece, Malaysia, Panama, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan will be the first to make the initiative available. Over the next few weeks, more U.S. states and countries around the world will announce the initiative to their people.
As businesses across sectors lay off workers due to an abrupt economic slowdown, the world faces the biggest unemployment crisis in the modern era. The pandemic has affected the livelihoods of 2.7 billion workers globally. In the U.S. alone, jobless claims have surpassed 26 million.