For-credit learning and verified skills from global online learning provider have become fundamental pillars of the Ministry’s higher education and skills strategies
The speed of digital transformation is radically reshaping the labor market, and requiring universities to rethink how their course offerings connect curricula to careers. Building on our ongoing work to support national higher education systems during this period of change, I’m delighted to announce that we are renewing our relationship with Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Science and Higher Education, further integrating for-credit world-class learning into the country’s higher education sector.
The partnership will continue equipping tens of thousands of students across Kazakhstan with critical human, digital, business, and artificial intelligence (AI) skills, supporting the Ministry’s efforts to provide all Kazakh learners with access to the world’s best education. Students will be able to gain industry-recognized certifications in Data Science, Cybersecurity, AI, Engineering, and Finance, equipping them with the essential skills they require to thrive in the global digital economy.
By doing so, Coursera for Campus will support key imperatives for the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, including:
- Modernizing Kazakhstan’s higher education curricula, by providing Kazakh students with access to 13,500 courses from more than 375 of the world’s leading companies and universities, and enabling Coursera courses to be taken for credit. Students earn official transferable ECTS credits toward their degrees by completing job-relevant certifications.
- Equipping all Kazakhstani students with foundational AI knowledge at scale, through widespread access to introductory courses like Google AI Essentials and cutting-edge content from some of the world’s most innovative AI companies, such as Building with the Claude API from Anthropic.
- In this way, access to Coursera’s 1,100+ GenAI courses supports the AI-Sana initiative. Recognizing that AI literacy is now a foundational skillset for all graduates, irrespective of field, AI-Sana ensures that every graduate enters the workforce with a foundational understanding of Generative AI and Digital Ethic
- Promoting the Kazakh language in online education: as part of the initiative, over 4,000 courses on priority topics including AI, GenAI, data science, and machine learning were translated into Kazakh to overcome language barriers, and ensure that the best education is available in the national tongue.
Coursera has served as a critical strategic skills development partner for Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Science and Higher Education since 2022. To date, our collaboration has supported the country’s higher education sector to bridge the gap between curriculum and careers, with results including:
- Over 235,000 students reached
- Over 500,000 certificates earned across over 100 Kazakhstani universities
- The project expanding from 25 to 93 universities in its first year, then further increasing to 95 in 2025
- Over 4,000 courses translated into Kazakh using machine learning translations
- 4.9/5 average course rating awarded by Kazakh learners
Kazakhstan’s bold higher education strategy has established it as a pioneer in for-credit, skills-first learning, and the results are tangible. Our latest Global Skills Report ranked Kazakhstan 37th globally for overall skill proficiency — leading the Central Asian region by a significant margin.
Our continued partnership will ensure that Kazakh learners have access to cutting-edge skills from our more than 375 trusted content partners, including industry leaders like Google, Anthropic, and Microsoft; and world-class universities such as University of Michigan, Duke University, and Vanderbilt University.
Sayasat Nubrek, Minister of Science and Higher Education, Kazakhstan, said: “We’ve always talked about upskilling and reskilling, but there’s a new term: deepskilling. What do you do when short-term training is not enough, when demands are radically new, and AI is changing the whole labor market landscape? You need the flexibility to adapt to it and enough depth and institutional capacity for deepskilling to change the core skill sets of your labor force. That’s a huge challenge for many governments, and it is one that Coursera is empowering us to solve.”
Among those Kazakhstani universities whose students have benefited from access to the Coursera platform is International Information Technology University (IITU). Over 6,000 of its students have enrolled in nearly 99,000 courses, completing over 86,000 of them — an 87% completion rate. Highly satisfied learners (9/10 average rating) attribute their course selection to industry relevance (45%) and practical application (30%).
Coursera currently supports the skills development of over 900,000 Kazakhstani learners, who have recorded over 1.9 million hours of learning on the platform. In September 2025, Kazakhstan’s Minister of Science and Higher Education, Sayasat Nubrek, was honored with the “Learning Hero” Award at the global Coursera Connect Awards, for the Ministry’s work to transform both teaching and learning at a countrywide scale.
