Coursera Hits 1 Million Users

Sites include coursera.org . Published on August 25th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

A few years ago there were those in academia who felt that online education would never rival the face-to-face dominance of offline education, but were they wrong?

Today there’s no shortage of online institutions who offer education al courses and one such provider is Coursera. Started by two Stanford University scientists, the platform has grown so much in popularity that it now has over 1 million users—and growing.

The model behind Coursera is simple: users can access free courses taught in some of the world’s top universities, all from the comfort of their homes. So far the start-up offers over 117 courses and gets its content from the 16 schools who participate in the course-sharing program. The growth of the site has been a positive one for the founders who expressed their gratitude via a blog post: “Thank you all so much for signing up, taking classes, and encouraging your friends and family to participate. This is an exciting moment in education, in which we seem to be standing at the cusp of a major transformation.”

Users may still have to keep in the back of their minds that Coursera is a funded business and that at some point down the line, the site will need to monetize the audience. For now users can lap up high quality tuition at the best price known to man—FREE.