Knowledge Is Great, Skills Are Greater

Dear friends,

This week, Coursera held its annual conference in Las Vegas. A major theme was the shift from knowledge- to skills-based education, which will help many individuals, businesses, and educational institutions. This annual gathering brings together leaders from academia, business, and government to discuss the latest in education and workforce development, and I was delighted to compare notes with others about the latest developments.

Greg Hart, Coursera’s wonderful CEO, spoke about creating a skills-based approach to education. For individuals who want to improve their job prospects, shifting the emphasis from gaining knowledge to gaining skills can be very helpful. I’ve also seen many businesses increase their focus on skills-based hiring and employee development.

What does this mean? A lot of traditional education focuses on knowledge. After earning a degree, you know a lot! In contrast, a skills-based approach focuses on developing practical abilities and improving what you can do with what you know. While knowledge (such as understanding how RAG works) is useful, it is even more valuable when you can do something with it (such as build a RAG system).

AI, being a very practical field, has always had a strong emphasis on applied skills, but in an era when people are questioning the value of academic degrees, other sectors would also benefit by shifting toward skills. For example, instead of asking if an art history major understands their subject, we might ask what skills they have acquired that would enable them to complete useful tasks. This mindset shift can help educational institutions deliver training that is more helpful for finding jobs.

A skills-based mindset is useful:

For individuals, as skills give you competencies to get meaningful work done.
For businesses, which can assess job candidates’ skills and also help employees develop new skills that enable their teams to get work done.
For educational institutions, which help individuals gain access to more opportunities by imparting skills as well as knowledge.

While skill-based education applies to many sectors, not just engineering (you can learn skills to perform tasks in human resources, marketing, finance, and much more), it is highly relevant to AI. Skill at steering coding assistants and applying AI building blocks (like prompting, RAG, evals, and so on) lets you build more valuable software. To help learners build these kinds of applied abilities, Coursera is introducing a series of “skill tracks” programs.

A second theme at the conference was the education community’s rapid pace of exploration in using AI to improve learner experiences. For example, Coursera announced a new Role Play feature that lets instructors give a large language model instructions akin to system prompts to create chatbots that let learners practice certain interactions. For example, after teaching communication skills, a course might invite a learner to role-play having a conversation on a difficult issue with a chatbot to gain practice for real conversations.

Generative AI will transform education in ways that go well beyond chatbots. I’ll have more to say about this in the future!

Finally, on a personal note, I was glad to see Coursera’s partners warmly welcome Greg Hart. As the company’s Chairman and Co-founder, it has been my privilege to support Greg and his team’s tireless work to serve learners. The world keeps changing, and so there’s always more to learn and — more important — to help others learn. I’m grateful to Greg, the Coursera team, and Coursera’s partners for working to serve learners.

It has been 12 years since the first Coursera Conference, and despite all the progress we have made (183M registered learners to date), the work that remains seems as important and as exciting as ever.

Keep building!

Andrew