Coursera Learning Excellence Award 2026: Kazakhstan Named Among Leaders in Digital Education

The Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Kazakhstan has received the Coursera Learning Excellence Award 2026, an international prize for outstanding achievements in the development of digital learning, reports the magazine Modern Education, citing the Telegram channel of Sayasat Nurbek.

“This award recognizes the extensive work we have been consistently carrying out in education, digital skills, and artificial intelligence,” writes the Minister of Science and Higher Education. “For me personally, this award is especially meaningful because behind it stand not only state policy, international partnerships, and new educational technologies. Behind it stand people: hundreds of thousands of young Kazakhstanis who have gained the opportunity to learn from the world’s best instructors, master in-demand professions, change their trajectories, and build their own futures.

Just imagine the scale:

– More than 292,000 learners have already earned Coursera certificates.

– The total number of certificates earned has exceeded 682,000.

– Kazakhstanis have devoted more than 5.35 million hours to learning.

– 163,000 academic credits have already been recognized in our universities’ degree programs.

– In 2026, we allocated 38,184 licenses to 100 universities across the country.

Behind each of these figures is someone’s new competence, a first professional opportunity, a personal project, or the idea for a future startup.

When we began our cooperation with Coursera in 2022, we faced an ambitious goal: to make high-quality international education more accessible to Kazakhstani students and to integrate it into our national higher education system. Today we can see that this decision works.

It is especially important that digital education is no longer an optional extra for individual students. It is becoming part of the country’s educational ecosystem.

In 2025, I was honored with the Coursera Learning Hero Award. Today’s Coursera Learning Excellence Award 2026 is a recognition of the systemic work of our entire team, the universities, the instructors, and, most importantly, the students themselves.

I would like to separately thank our international partners at Coursera for their trust and joint work, and of course everyone who works every day to make Kazakhstani education more modern and competitive.

But for us, no international award is a reason to stop. On the contrary, it is an added responsibility and an incentive to keep moving forward. I am convinced that in the 21st century, a state’s main competitive advantage is not natural resources but the knowledge, intellect, and abilities of its citizens.

Our task is to ensure that a young person from any region of Kazakhstan has access to world-class knowledge and can create technologies, launch their own business, and compete in the global market. This is exactly the kind of education system we are building,” concludes Sayasat Nurbek.