
List of the Most Popular MOOCs - Schiphol
http://www.onlinecoursereport.com/the-50-most-popular-moocs-of-all-time/
======
jfaucett
Im Noticing a lot of these courses are coursera, and one of the most
frustrating things about the plattform is the fact that most courses close and
access to course materials/videos etc. is revoked after the course is over,
this destroys the whole point of a mooc for me, and this choice seems
arbitrary.

Why cant education materials just be open and remain open to everyone,
journals and textbooks included? There are enough tax paying citizens all over
the world pumping money into our education systems that there is no reason it
should not be freely available 24/7 to all.

The fact that unlimited free education still doesnt exist in 2015 makes me sad
everytime I think about it.

~~~
acjohnson55
I agree. Coursera's approach seems to capture the worst of both worlds of
traditional and online ed. It lacks the live lecture and person-to-person
contact of a traditional college course. Yet, it maintains the timeboxed
approach of traditional ed, which exists chiefly to provide simultaneity, to
scale real-life human contact to lecture-hall size.

Now I realize that some aspects of the way some courses are run require
simultaneity. Things like human-powered grading, by TAs or peers. But they
don't _have_ to be designed that way. I've taken Coursera courses that are
largely machine graded. For those, there doesn't seem to be any real reason
why the courses are timeboxed. And even for courses where this is difficult to
design around, it seems like it should be possible to tighten the iteration
cycle.

~~~
repsilat
> ... worst of both worlds ... timeboxed approach

Just to provide the other side of the story, I've done about a dozen MOOCs
(mostly through Coursera) and I'm most of the way through Georgia Tech's
online masters program.

Having to make progress every week is contributes a _lot_ to me actually
finishing these courses. The Udacity courses I've signed up for never get
touched because there's no urgency. Ditto the textbooks on my shelf that I
keep meaning to go through, and the Open Yale and MIT OCW courses I've
bookmarked... I obviously have the time, but unless there's a threat of "Do it
now or it's gone" I'll probably go and watch TV when I get home from work.

~~~
acjohnson55
I think that's fine, but if the urgency is manufactured, I'd argue that it
should be an additional feature to provide that urgency, rather than the
default.

I'm the other side of the coin. I may start off on schedule, but once life
intervenes and I fall behind, and I've gotten a couple zeros, I'm like why
bother catching up? As a result, I've only successfully finished one out of
the 6 or 7 Coursera courses I've started.

------
thewarrior
The Design Of Computer Programs on Udacity by Peter Norvig is pretty awesome.
As someone who's only been seriously programming for a year or two , each
problem set went like this :

Write the code here to do X :

I write a messy 4 liner after lots of thinking.

Professor Norvig comes along and does it in a simple functional one liner.

Mind blown.

He teaches good functional style program design one epiphany at a time.

~~~
blacksmythe

      >> Professor Norvig comes along and does it in a simple functional one liner.
      >> Mind blown.
    

That is how I felt taking Martin Odersky's Scala course.

------
geomark
I've _completed_ a bunch of Coursera courses. Quality really varies. Even
within the 9 course Data Science specialization [1] track some courses were
rather poor while the rest were very good. I'm currently taking the #5 rated
course [2]. It is excellent. But I'm only taking it because the Statisical
Inference course in the Data Science specialization was so weak.

I would also recommend the Cryptography 1 course by Dan Boneh on Coursera [3].
Excellent if you are at all interested in the subject.

I always download the lecture videos, slides, quizzes, labs and exams because,
as mentioned, many of the courses don't allow access once the class is
completed.

You definitely have to have plenty of self discipline to complete MOOCs. And I
don't have any delusions about a Coursera certificate being useful in landing
a job; that's not what I'm after. I'm building the skills I want to apply to
my own projects.

[1]
[https://www.coursera.org/specializations/jhudatascience](https://www.coursera.org/specializations/jhudatascience)
[2]
[https://www.coursera.org/course/statistics](https://www.coursera.org/course/statistics)
[3]
[https://www.coursera.org/course/crypto](https://www.coursera.org/course/crypto)

~~~
sawwit
[https://www.coursetalk.com](https://www.coursetalk.com) has quite good
reviews, especially on the more popular courses.

------
yeukhon
I am surprised that Khan Academy is not recognized in this report probably
because the scope is limited to just those offer by an accredited university.
I think calculus and chemistry have helped many first and second years of
college students taking introductory courses including myself. I think KA is
probably the most popular MOOC for all ages, in the most accessible way given
it only requires a YouTube account, which millions have for over a decade. But
that's just my opinion.

YouTube has a few really amazing courses available online.

For example, UCB has a channel with up-to-date content that otherwise not
available on MOOC platform.

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMV45tHCYNI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMV45tHCYNI) is a very good class on data structure

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyUK5RAJg1c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyUK5RAJg1c) and the rest has very good lectures on theory of computation

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G6_-ljgmXE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G6_-ljgmXE) also very good for algorithms. I find MIT's version to be too theory based for practitioners. Anyway, I still watch MIT's just to complement anything missing (no two speakers can teach the same topic equally)

------
Pamar
Interesting but... I enrolled _and completed_ a couple of the courses listed
there. I'd be interested in seeing for each what percentage of enrolled
students actually completed the whole course. Anecdotally the numbers are
really really low (as in "around 5%").

~~~
dagw
I'm a huge MOOC fan, but after completing a couple of the very early Stanford
ones I haven't completed any. Quite frankly I don't see completing a MOOC as
the best use of time. I use MOOCs to either pick up new skills I need for
work, brush up on stuff I haven't looked at since University or as
'entertainment', basically learning interesting stuff purely for fun. For non
of these things actually completing the course to their satisfaction adds
anything to their value.

I wish people would stop looking so much at completion scores and not judge
the concept as a failure just because they are so low.

~~~
VLM
I would agree with and extend your remarks that getting a title of nobility
from a brick and mortar uni gives you a vocational meal ticket, so you can
motivate grinders by asking if they like money of if they like eating food,
and then they'll grind away for letters on a transcript.

But in MOOC land I get nothing. I did the complete automata class mostly to
see if there's much new since I did a brick and mortar version some decades
ago, and the "reward" was not exactly fulfilling. I'm not expecting Ullman to
fly out and shake my hand, or my phone to ring off the hook from recruiters
seeing I jumped thru some hoops, but something more would have been nice?
Actually, anything would have been nice?

Since the grind factor was aggressively burned out of me, I haven't completed
a single course. I did watch the videos and did the assignments for
computational neuroscience and one of the multi-class algo series and the
functional programming and the famous AI class.

There's a lot of talk about how grinders don't grind therefore grinders suck
or grinding sucks. However what really sucks is the playground presented to
the grinders. Its not their fault they aren't being given something worth
grinding.

By analogy most MMORPGs that tanked and died, tanked and died because the
grind experience sucked. Its not the fault of the grinders that the
businessmen couldn't or wouldn't present something as enjoyably grindable as
WoW or Eve.

To some extent the whole market segment of MOOCs smells like a freshmen psych
class lab experiment, "what happens to grind performance when you leave all
the annoyance factors of grinds in place but remove all the rewards, with the
hypothesis that almost every rat in the box stops grinding"

~~~
ghaff
It's not clear what you're looking for exactly but, if anything, MOOCs
(Coursera at any rate) have cut back on issuing completion certificates in the
absence of paying a fee. Their problem, one of them anyway, is that
certificates basically aren't worth anything as a certification mechanism in
most cases so very few are willing to pay for them.

And, I expect, that if you start from the assumptions that 1.) MOOC
certificates aren't worth anything as a real-world "vocational meal ticket"
beyond the value of the underlying education and 2.) Companies offering MOOCs
are not going to become unicorns and probably won't even return investors
money-- you probably end up with something that isn't designed to mirror a
university course.

~~~
VLM
I know that's the conventional top down narrative and I think you presented it
well.

I'm proposing that as a bottom up narrative, they continue to include
extensive grind barriers such as peculiar scheduling and pacing, someone else
designing arbitrary barriers in terms of assignments with firm due dates, etc.
Yet the reward has been cut out as per reasons in the top down narrative, etc.
So from the bottom up perspective you're left with a stereotypical grind game
where the reward has been removed, and from that theoretical model, the
dropout rate makes sense. Then when people sign up and get something out of
partial participation, it makes no sense to use a successful grind game metric
measurement when its a failed grind game therefore the players aren't
cooperating because they feel no need to do so. Because "MOOC as a grind game"
has failed, a MOOC is a place to learn, not a place to jump thru hoops or not
get a reward other than making someone else's completion metric result look
good.

You can run a grind game without a vocational meal ticket reward model. WoW
and Eve do just fine.

My suggestion would be to use advanced technology to abandon the grind game
aspects, assuming higher completion rates are inherently valuable. Even if
completion rates are not valuable, removal of pointless grind will result in
better operating conditions for the students. Why must class schedules
correspond vaguely to the northern hemisphere agricultural growing season? If
you're not teaching project management, why are due dates so important? Why is
there (typically) only one very fixed learning track if more exist or there is
a "chose two from column B and three from column C" aspect inherent in the
field itself? All of that would be very difficult to implement at Harvard in
1640, but due to technological advances would not be very challenging to
implement today.

~~~
ghaff
Maybe. I'd just say though that one person's "designing arbitrary barriers in
terms of assignments with firm due dates, etc." is another's structured
approach to learning. After all, there are plenty of learning opportunities if
you want total flexibility.

Of course, as you suggest, there are potentially ways to gamify and provide
incentives for learning that don't as closely mimic traditional course
structures.

------
ForHackernews
I'll just throw in a plug here for Prof. Abu-Mostafa's _Learning from Data_
course at Caltech, which is outstanding:
[http://work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html](http://work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html)

Unlike Andrew Ng's Coursera Machine Learning class, it is a real,
unadulterated Caltech class, and exactly as challenging as that implies. It
delves much more deeply into the mathematics behind ML, and the homework
assignments are quite time consuming.

I took it as part of an interactive session through EdX, and the professor
himself was extremely active on the forums: responding to student questions,
clarifying lecture points, and giving homework suggestions--seemingly at all
hours of the day and night.

------
andyjohnson0
I did #27 "Introduction to Mathematical Thinking" during Feb-April this year.
I enjoyed it a lot and found it challenging without being impossible to
complete. Finished with a distinction and a feeling of great satisfaction.

I'm now doing Coursera's Interaction Design specialisation [1], which is
proving to be very informative and a lot of fun.

If you're considering doing a MOOC then I'd definitely recommend it. Choose a
free, short-ish course to start with, make the commitment, and dive in.

[1] [https://www.coursera.org/specializations/interaction-
design](https://www.coursera.org/specializations/interaction-design)

~~~
sotojuan
That looks like a great series of courses. Unfortunately I am too busy with
real school right now, but hopefully they offer them again.

------
kailuowang
I found it very interesting that the second most popular Mooc of all time is a
philosophy course.

Although personally I like better the philosophy introduction offered by MIT:

[https://courses.edx.org/courses/MITx/24.00_1x/3T2014/info](https://courses.edx.org/courses/MITx/24.00_1x/3T2014/info)

I am also looking forward to this one [https://www.edx.org/course/philosophy-
minds-machines-mitx-24...](https://www.edx.org/course/philosophy-minds-
machines-mitx-24-09x)

> An introduction to philosophy of mind, exploring consciousness, reality, AI,
> and more. The most in-depth philosophy course available online.

> What you will learn

The basics of argumentation

Some central arguments for and against the view that a sufficiently powerful
computer can think (AI)

The main theories of mental states and their relations to physical states

Some central arguments for and against the view that the world is not as we
perceive it to be

What the "hard problem of consciousness" is

------
mdevere
I'm a big fan of uDacity, which only appears once in that list.

For a novice, their 'Intro to Computer Science' course is fantastic, as is the
follow-on 'Web Development' course, led by Steve Huffman.

------
myth_buster
I've been doing Coursera courses for the past few years in an on/off fashion.
I'm pleasantly

surprised by the courses that are more popular in this list.

I think the pattern is that the foundational or introductory courses are
popular as they have a

larger audience. But it doesn't comment on the quality of the course. An
interesting data point

is the social media "Share" widget that appears on the right column [0].

[0]
[https://www.coursera.org/course/rprog](https://www.coursera.org/course/rprog)

------
gloves
I wonder how many of these were actually completed...

Enrolment would be an empty number to me, completion would be the mark of
quality.

~~~
brudgers
It's lower, but still orders of magnitude greater than complete the equivalent
bricks and mortar course. If 1% complete the Android course that's 50 years
worth of two classes of 30 students a year. At 10% it would take Adam Porter
500 years.

The thing about MOOC's is that scale is staggering.

------
Dowwie
It's insufficient to measure Popularity as the total number of registrants.
People browse through course offerings, register, and may never return.

Rating by the total number of students that completed a course would be even
more revealing. Add a student retention rate, too. Etc etc.

------
Confusion
I'm not sure whether the number of people enrolled in a course is a very good
measure for the impact of a course. I agree with some other commenters that
the number of people that completed a course isn't necessarily a good measure
either. Some measure that includes the percentage of videos watched, exercises
attempted, links followed, etc. would probably better represent the actual
impact of a course.

Some considerations: all courses have lots of people that enroll to
subsequently discover the course is hard, boring or otherwise not what they
expected. I expect this number varies strongly per course. On the other hand,
not attempting/passing exercises doesn't mean someone hasn't invested time in
watching all lectures.

------
chris_wot
It's heartening there are so many math focused courses. With the Calculus
course at
[https://www.coursera.org/learn/calculus1/](https://www.coursera.org/learn/calculus1/)
\- I'm going over differential calculus right now, but I'm getting somewhat
stuck on the Chain Rule, and in particular working out how to use it to
differentiate 2^x.

The courses I've found so far haven't been all that helpful, even Khan academy
is confusing me somewhat. Does this course explain things better?

~~~
spacehome
Since 2 = e ^ ln 2, use the identity:

2^x = (e^(ln 2))^x = e ^ (x * ln 2)

~~~
VLM
Well, that's the specific example, but there exist a class of educational
blocks such that the learner doesn't know where they're stuck, because if they
could define it, the act of correctly defining the stuck step would inherently
unstick it.

So MOOC strategy works for some areas that don't have sticking points like
that, but not so well where five minutes with a Socratic strategy tutor could
save a lot of video re-watching time. Arguably, better video would point out
likely sticking points. However, advanced math instructors got their position
not by getting education degrees which theoretically vocationally train people
to present like that, but got their position by being very successful when
getting a PHD in an obscure and advanced part of the field. So if you're
lucky, your higher math instructor might be a talented educator in addition to
being a talented mathematician... but probably not, unfortunately.

It would be interesting as a thought experiment, or maybe as a startup, to see
a good (emphasis on good) K-12 math instructor with a strong background in
educational teaching skills try to teach diffeqs or higher math in general. I
suspect they'd be extremely good at it, although probably very slow.

~~~
huherto
A lot of those questions are taken care on the forums. People tend to stumble
on the same sticking points. But it part of learning to learn in this new
medium.

------
alinspired
Here is the list without 50 pagedowns:

    
    
      1. Programming Mobile Applications for Android Handheld Systems – Part 1 / University of Maryland
      2. Introduction to Philosophy / University of Edinburgh
      3. Inspiring Leadership through Emotional Intelligence / Case Western Reserve
      4. Introduction to Computer Science / Harvard University
      5. Data Analysis and Statistical Inference / Duke University
      6. Gamification / University of Pennsylvania / Wharton
      7. Social Psychology / Wesleyan University
      8. Circuits and Electronics / MIT
      9. Think Again: How to Reason and Argue / Duke University
      10. Creativity, Innovation and Change / Penn State
      11. A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior / Duke University
      12. Learn to Program: The Fundamentals / University of Toronto
      13. Game Theory / Stanford University, University of British Columbia
      14. Greek and Roman Mythology / University of Pennsylvania
      15. Startup Engineering / Stanford University
      16. Computational Investing, Part I / Georgia Institute of Technology
      17. Financial Markets / Yale University
      18. Introduction to Artificial Intelligence / Stanford University
      19. Introduction to Computer Science and Programming / MIT
      20. Introduction to Financial Accounting / University of Pennsylvania / Wharton
      21. Modern & Contemporary American Poetry / University of Pennsylvania
      22. Machine Learning / Stanford University
      23. Data Analysis / Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School
      24. Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python / MIT
      25. Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science / Harvard University
      26. Introduction to Philosophy: God, Knowledge, and Consciousness / MIT
      27. Introduction to Operations Management / University of Pennsylvania / Wharton
      28. Introduction to Mathematical Thinking / Stanford University
      29. Justice / Harvard University
      30. A History of the World Since 1300 / Princeton University
      31. Creative Programming for Digital Media & Mobile Apps / University of London/ Goldsmiths
      32. Neural Networks for Machine Learning / University of Toronto
      33. Learn to Program – Crafting Quality Code / University of Toronto
      34. Critical Thinking in Global Challenges / The University of Edinburgh
      35. Statistics – Making Sense of Data / University of Toronto
      36. Introduction to Biology – The Secret of Life / MIT
      37. Drugs and the Brain / Caltech
      38. Introduction to Databases / Stanford University
      39. The Ancient Greek Hero / Harvard University
      40. Social Network Analysis / University of Michigan
      41. Health in Numbers: Quantitative Methods in Clinical & Public Health Research / Harvard University
      42. Introduction to Astronomy / Duke University
      43. Human Health and Global Environmental Change / Harvard University
      44. Software Defined Networking / Princeton University
      45. Introduction to Statistics: Descriptive Statistics / UC Berkeley
      46. Computing for Data Analysis / Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
      47. Functional Programming Principles in Scala / Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
      48. The Camera Never Lies / University of London/ Royal Holloway
      49. Calculus One / Ohio State University
      50. Maps and the Geospatial Revolution / Penn State

------
jskonhovd
I typically hate ranking lists like this, since I believe student completion
rates are more important than enrollment. However, I did find some joy in
finding a new MOOC I could add to the backlog of courses I need to take.

~~~
Symmetry
I'm not sure why you'd worry about completion rates. When I've taken online
courses I've completed all the lectures and their associated exercises. But if
I'm taking a course it means I have some end in mind for the skills it teaches
me and that makes any final project or exam superfluous.

~~~
Pamar
I have to disagree: for me the final project was important to immediately put
to the test the things I had learned. And - as I explained above - if the
course has peer-grading (almost a given if it has a final project, because you
cannot automate the evaluation of a project) you learn even more by evaluating
the ways other approached their solution.

------
hellofunk
I'm a little surprised that there is no mention of iTunes University, or maybe
that doesn't count as a MOOC. I know there are some very popular courses on
there that are easy to access.

~~~
chris_wot
iTunes university is really quite awesome. Only you need an Apple product to
access it.

~~~
wlesieutre
iTunes runs on Windows

~~~
dagw
There are also bunch of third party apps for Android and Linux that let you
download iTunes U lectures.

------
hicksca
Surprise that a philosophy class ranked at number two. Other then that the
list mostly looks like what you'd expect.

------
arnold_palmur
I'm surprised, no Jeff Ullman Automata?

------
amelius
It would be nice if the prerequisites for a course were listed more clearly.

------
nraynaud
I don't like education and universities and all that stuff, I would like them
to release the videos and the text in the open, that I can learn my way, not
in a supervised fashion, behind a login wall.

------
Dowwie
there's a MOOC aggregator to help keep on top of course offerings and it
tracks programs globally: www.class-central.com

~~~
Splendor
Clickable link: [https://www.class-central.com/](https://www.class-
central.com/)

