Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Science and Higher Education renews partnership with Coursera, continuing to deliver world-class education to leading companies and universities.

Credit learning and certified skills from online learning providers around the world have become cornerstones of the Department of Higher Education’s strategies and skills

The pace of digital transformation is reshaping the labor market, and requires universities to rethink how their courses of study connect curricula and jobs. Building on our continued work to support national higher education programs during this period of transition, I am pleased to announce that we are renewing our relationship with the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Kazakhstan, continuing to integrate world-class education into the country’s higher education sector.

The partnership will continue to equip tens of thousands of students across Kazakhstan with critical human, digital, business, and artificial intelligence (AI) skills, supporting the Department’s efforts to provide all Kazakh students with access to world-class education. Students will be able to earn industry-recognized certifications in Data Science, Cybersecurity, AI, Engineering, and Finance, equipping them with the critical skills they need to succeed in the global digital economy.

In doing so, Coursera for Campus will support the Department of Science and Higher Education’s key requirements, including:

• Modernizing Kazakhstan’s higher education curriculaby giving Kazakh students access to 13,500 courses from more than 375 of the world’s leading companies and universities, and making Coursera courses available for credit. Students earn valid transferable ECTS credits toward their degrees by completing work-related certifications.
• Equipping all Kazakhstani students with basic knowledge of AI degree, with extensive access to introductory courses such as Google AI Essentials and premium 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 campaign. Recognizing that AI literacy is now a core skill set for all graduates, regardless of where they studied, AI-Sana ensures that every graduate enters the workforce with a basic understanding of Generative AI and the Digital Ethic.
• Developing the Kazakh language in online education: as part of the program, more than 4,000 courses on key 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 language.

Coursera has served as a key strategic capacity building partner of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Kazakhstan since 2022. To date, our collaboration has supported the country’s higher education sector to close the gap between curriculum and activities, with results including:

• More than 235,000 students have been reached
• More than 500,000 certificates have been earned more than 100 universities in Kazakhstan
• The project is expanding from 25 to 93 universities in its first year, and then grow to 95 by 2025
• More than 4,000 lessons translated into Kazakh using machine learning versions
• 4.9/5 average course rating given to Kazakh students

Kazakhstan’s bold higher education strategy has established it as a credit-first, skills-first initiative, and the results are showing. Our latest Global Skills report ranked Kazakhstan 37th globally for overall skills – leading the Central Asian region by a significant margin.

Our ongoing partnership will ensure that Kazakh students have access to the best skills from our more than 375 trusted content partners, including industry leaders such as Google, Anthropic, and Microsoft; and world-class universities such as the 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 word: deepskilling. What do you do when short-term training is not enough, when the demands are very new, and AI is changing the entire labor market? You need flexibility to adapt to it and enough depth and institutional power to go deep to change the core challenge of your biggest skill, the biggest challenge of your government and the biggest challenge of your workforce. Coursera gives us the power to solve. “

Among those universities in Kazakhstan whose students have benefited from accessing the Coursera platform is the International Information Technology University (IITU). More than 6,000 of its students are enrolled in nearly 99,000 courses, completing more than 86,000 of them – a completion rate of 87%. The most satisfied students (average rating of 9/10) say that their choice of course is related to the field (45%) and practical application (30%).

Coursera currently supports the skill development of more than 900,000 Kazakhstani students, who have logged more than 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 Department’s work in transforming both teaching and learning across the country.