Back in October 2011, Stanford professors launched three free online courses, open to the public. One by one, these courses went massive, with enrollments topping 100.000 students each. Soon the media was calling these courses MOOCs, short for massive open online courses.
Since then, more than 1.200 universities around the world have launched free online courses. In addition to the larger global MOOC platforms, many national governments around the world have launched their own country-specific MOOC platforms, including India, Italy, Israel, Mexico and Thailand.
After a decade of popularization, in 2021, over 220 million students had signed up for at least one course on one of these platforms, and 40 million did so in 2021 alone. MOOCs and MOOC platforms are still growing, even after the crazy “Year of the MOOC” prompted by the pandemic and travel restrictions.
At Class Central, we try to catalog as many MOOCs as possible, and our listing currently includes more than 150.000 of them, from MOOC platforms and other online learning platforms. But due to limited resources, we cannot index every single one. If you’re looking for MOOCs from around the world, this list is our best attempt to catalog all different MOOC platforms that are out there.
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list of countries that offer MOOCs.