A peak at my Mini MOOC Guide Infographic
In 2008, the first official Massive Open Online Course, or "MOOC" was held with over 2,225 students participating from around the globe. In 2014, over 183,703,144 students have signed up to take a MOOC.
All data in the following MOOC is based on information I gathered from the web on July 14–15, 2014. My main source of information was Stephen Downes, one of the founders of the first MOOC in the Fall of 2008. His site MOOC.ca lists all providers of MOOCs, which I compared with providers listed in Class-Central.com, a MOOC aggregator, as well as Wikipedia.
From these, I gathered a total of 43 MOOC Providers, of which I checked out all 43 providers individually to access 1) the number of courses, 2) number of instructors; 3) number of institutions involved; and 4) students taking courses. The number of courses counted included past, current, and present. The number of instructors counted included instructors (not Teaching Assistants) involved in all classes past and present. Where an instructor was not listed, I counted only 1 instructor and only counted an instructor once, regardless of multiple courses taught. Institutions of higher education, government, and corporate were included in connected institutions. Student taking courses is the estimated number from numbers disclosed by the MOOC providers information pages.
Social engagements measures the amount of users interacting with the MOOC provider through Facebook and Twitter through comments, likes or favoriting, and sharing information. As education moves online, measuring this engagement is an important indicator of learning communities. For a closer look at the social engagement, I used the site TrueSocialMetrics.com for the week of July 7–July 13 2014. Comments per post was measured by number of comments divided by number of posts. Shares per post is similar, with number of shares divided by number of posts over one week. This is the same for the number of Twitter favorites (starred posts) or Facebook "Likes" divided by posts.
Mini MOOC Guide: Top U.S. MOOC Providers in 2014