How Coursera Achieved an Active Learning Rate of 94%

Providing meaningful learning opportunities is fundamental to the success of Coursera, a company offering resources and courses to nearly 130 million learners worldwide. But with the wrong tech stack in place, Coursera struggled to promote an internal culture of ongoing learning. To mend the cracks in its tech stack, Coursera switched to Highspot

Disjointed tech stack hinders enablement success

Initially, Coursera approached Highspot to help solve its content management struggles.

“We were hosting all of our materials on a central intranet site,” explained Dustin Day, senior global manager of sales enablement at Coursera. “That naturally created a ton of pain points in terms of finding content, engaging with content, and proactively providing feedback to keep things fresh.”

But the story doesn’t end there: As Coursera’s enablement team reimagined their content strategy with Highspot, they took an equally critical look at their onboarding and training programs. Their previous learning management system struggled to connect content and guidance to training. For an organization founded on meaningful learning experiences, it was a painful gap. To streamline the experience for learners, Coursera knew it was time to switch to Highspot.

Unified platform paves the way forward

As Coursera transitioned away from its training vendor, it knew what was possible. After all, it had achieved incredible results once before.

“We needed to put some rigor behind content as we matured,” added Day. “With Highspot, we did that. As we continue to build that muscle, we feel like we’re growing in maturity.”

With Sales Plays and content reinforcing knowledge gained in Lessons and Courses, Coursera ensured reps have a standardized foundation of essential knowledge and a self-serve roadmap to implement it in the field. Since shifting its training efforts to Highspot, Coursera’s enablement activities operate in conversation with each other, building an environment of ongoing, self-serve learning that reorients outcomes for the better. As more and more reps see the value of the new strategy (with 92% adopting Sales Plays) the effect on Coursera is clear. And with 81% of reps regularly using Highspot, that impact is compounding, sparking consistent, well-informed execution in the field.

Making plans for the future

Now that every enablement activity is firmly situated in Highspot, it’s been much easier for Coursera’s enablement team to develop a holistic picture of how their efforts support reps.

“Highspot simplified the one-stop shop for our team as it relates to Learning Paths, new go-to-market builds, upskilling, and reskilling,” concluded Day. “We’ve been able to use the recording functionality to build best practice pages around what a good pitch looks like, so reps can start to flex that muscle better. When we build, we build in Highspot.”

With natively built training and coaching capabilities transforming, Coursera has reignited its learning culture. Now, it intends to take this learning a step further, aiming to introduce Digital Rooms to its learners. With its sights set on tomorrow, Coursera is looking back on its successes and taking them into all of the work ahead. To date, the
organization has seen a 94% active learner rate, with nearly every seller engaging with and successfully completing learning activities from within Highspot.