Coursera Partners with Persona to Verify its Global User Base

Persona, the identity infrastructure company offering businesses the building blocks to create a personalized identity verification experience for any use case, announced today that it is partnering with Coursera, one of the world’s leading online learning platforms. Coursera selected Persona as its identity verification partner to better serve its community, which has grown to more than 82 million learners worldwide.

“Identity verification is a critical component of academic integrity, which Coursera and our partners take very seriously,” said Shravan Goli, Chief Product Officer at Coursera. “With Persona, we can make sure the right learner receives credit for the right content by quickly and reliably verifying a learner’s identity while adhering to evolving accessibility standards. Persona has helped automate our verification system, allowing us to focus on what matters most: creating a world-class online learning experience.”

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With Persona’s configurable and customizable solutions, Coursera is able to provide seamless identity verification for learners to receive their credentials. Coursera users are instantly verified through an easy to use interface that improved Coursera’s successful verification rates without compromising on fraud detection. Knowing learner success is an important factor for Coursera, Persona also created tailored metrics to help the company monitor success. Persona’s automation-first approach and international capabilities enable its identity verification services to scale with Coursera’s continued growth across the world and help support learners in new locations or with new use cases such as student IDs.

“As a global growth company, Coursera needs an identity verification provider that can keep up with demand for online learning,” said Goli. “Persona enables us to seamlessly customize the verification process, accounting for the unique needs and forms of identification across Coursera’s global learner community.”

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Persona’s integration capabilities and flexible API allowed Coursera to implement identity verification faster than its previous vendor. At the same time, Persona’s robust approach to compliance provides greater protections and support for Coursera to stay in line with evolving regulations. Persona is the only solution that is Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) compliant and is in line with WCAG 2.1 AA standards, satisfying accessibility requirements. Persona is also compliant with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). To ensure data storage and retention policies meet the specific needs from University partners, Persona gives Coursera full control over its data, including retention and redaction capabilities.

“We’ve worked closely with the team at Coursera to create a tailored experience that meets all their needs — one that can handle increased demand without impacting the learner experience, gives them the ability to expand to new use cases, and has the right protections in place,” said Rick Song, co-founder and CEO of Persona. “Our partnership ensures that everyone has access to educational content while keeping their personal information secure, which is crucial for the edtech industry.”