Coursera's Most Popular Online Courses

MOOCs have been around since 2008, when 25 students attended a course on connectivism at the University of Manitoba - with 2,300 joining online worldwide. They really hit the public consciousness around 2012, when Coursera was created. It partnered with universities to offer courses online, typically with a mix of active participation and self-paced study using filmed lectures and reading lists. Its closest competitor, edX, is a joint venture of Harvard and MIT. As the name suggests, MOOCs are designed for unlimited participation and are free, subsidized, or much cheaper than traditional higher education courses. Although they have been criticized for their low completion rate - an MIT study found an average quit rate of 96% over five years - that has done nothing to stop the demand. In 2019, MOOCs had attracted 110 million students and more than 900 universities around the world had submitted 13,500 courses.