Carlos Slim Foundation, Coursera Announce Spanish-Language Course Partnership

La Jornada reported on Thursday that the Carlos Slim Foundation, a philanthropic organization belonging to Mexican telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim, has announced a partnership with Coursera to translate into Spanish texts from dozens of its free online courses. Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera, told the paper that the partnership is aimed largely at Mexicans and other Latin Americans, including those living in the United States. According to MarketWired, the 50 courses to be translated over the coming year from Coursera’s vault of 600 will focus on subject areas considered high-priority, such as computer science, teacher professional development, healthcare and public health in addition to professional skills such as communication and leadership.

According to Coursera’s blog, the two groups plan to boost access to the courses through a series of existing spaces already provided by the Slim Foundation. Those spaces include its Casa Telmex network – 13 educational spaces in low-income urban areas – its Telmex Hub, a Mexico City center for technological innovation and education, and a new Telmex Digital Library in Mexico’s southeastern Veracruz state. They will also be expanding those digital libraries, which provide free computer use for students, to some 3,500 locations.

MasWired writes that rates of Internet usage have soared in Mexico in recent years, with 40.9 million users reporting regular use in 2012, compared to 7.1 million in 2001. That increase is to a large extent contained to the young – three-fourths of that 40.9 million is under thirty-five years old. 40 percent of the population over six years old are online.