2015 MOOC Provider Roundup: Has edX Dethroned Coursera?

A year ago today I published a post entitled "The 5 Best Free Online Course Providers in 2014" ranking my top 5 free online course providers on 5 key factors: website user experience, quality of instruction and course materials, amount and depth of content, community interaction and special features. Coursera came in first with a total of 21 out of 25 points, followed by edX with 19 and Udacity with 17. A year is a long time in an industry as new as massive online education and a lot of things have changed, so it's time to update the rankings!

#1

edX has improved the most of any MOOC platform over the past year, due in large part to its quickly expanding course catalog. In one year, edX's offerings have nearly tripled from 145 courses to 426, while maintaining the same high quality and content. edX continues to use paid verified certificates and donations as its monetization scheme instead of the mini-degrees being pushed by Coursera and Udacity. This appears to be for the best, as edX has consistently excellent content quality and challenging, deep courses, while competitors Coursera and Udacity seem to be offering increasingly shallow, short courses.

The edX website is mostly unchanged since this time last year. My main gripe with the site is that your completed, current and upcoming courses are all jumbled together in the same page, which is an annoyance if you take a lot of courses. In addition, the site has no public profile and forums can be a bit of mess. Some courses opt for external forums, which is not ideal for students who want everything in one place. Pet peeves aside, edX has a clean, sleek interface that tracks your assignment progress on a handy tab right on the top of the each course page

Bottom line: edX offers top-notch instruction and its rapidly expanding course catalog puts it at the top of the pack.

Ratings (1=poor, 2=fair, 3=good, 4=very good, 5= excellent):

Website User Experience	Quality of Instruction	Amount and Depth of Content	Community Interaction and Support	Certificates, Career Services and Other Features	Total Score
4	5	5	4	3	21

#2

Coursera is still the largest of the new wave MOOC providers, with 795 courses in its catalog. Unfortunately, many of the old, archived courses run very infrequently so the number of courses starting at any given time seems to be about the same as edX with one major exception: specializations. Specializations consist of several month long courses that the provider reruns every month or two, which give students an opportunity to take several courses from the same university in a single skill area and earn a credential. Getting a specialization requires passing all the required courses, completing a capstone project and paying for a verified certificate in each course, which generally runs $50 per course. The new system launched with a 9 course specializations in data science offered by John Hopkins and this year 3 new specializations are already starting in cloud computing, data mining and general programming. Coursera appears poised to launch dozens of specializations in the coming year.

Coursera's apparent focus on monetizing through specializations may lead to a major shift in content. A catalog of short courses that run each month would give new students the opportunity to take the courses they want to take without having to wait a year or more for the second or third offerings. On the other hand, this may force providers to split longer courses into pieces which may not be optimal for learning and it could lead to rushed ,shallow content. The John Hopkins data science courses were disappointing on the whole and the first courses in the new cloud computing and data mining specializations appear to be following in its footsteps. If Coursera cranks out too many specialization courses with poor instruction quality and hollow, information-dump style content, students seeking knowledge and skills over pieces of paper are going to look elsewhere.

The Coursera website itself hasn't gone through any major changes since last year and it is still responsive and easy to navigate. The forums are generally active, although forum activity is likely to drop over time for specialization courses after the first few offerings.

Bottom line: Coursera offers something for everyone, but the recent focus on monetization may be hurting course quality.

Website User Experience	Quality of Instruction	Amount and Depth of Content	Community Interaction and Support	Certificates, Career Services and Other Features	Total Score
4	4	4	4	4	20

#3

Over the past year, Udacity expanded its course catalog from 33 courses to 55, while shifting its focus from general computer science to programming skills related to high demand tech fields like web development and data analysis. Udacity has also increasingly enlisted industry experts at companies like Google, Twitter, Facebook and AT&T to create course content and help ensure students learn the skills they'll need in the real world.

The shift in content focus has been accompanied by a shift in credentialing and monetization: Udacity no longer offers free course certificates. Instead, certificates and special course features like project grading, code feedback and personalized coaching requires a $200 a month subscription. Starting in 2015, Udacity also began to roll out "nanodegrees" that aim to offer an added level of credentialing, similar to Coursera's specializations. Current nanodegrees include: Front-end Web Developer, Data Analyst, Full-Stack Web Developer, iOS developer and introduction to programming. Whether these nanodegrees will be recognized by major players in the tech industry remains to be seen, but considering Udacity's impressive list of strategic partners, they seem to be in a good position to help students advance in their chosen fields. That said, course video content remains free for the time being.

The main menus of the Udacity site have changed since last year, but the courses themselves are pretty much the same. Course sites are well organized and set up in a way that gives students a solid sense of progression. The long loading times for course materials have been improved but they aren't super snappy. Course search tools have also been improved with subject area and nanodegree filters, making it very easy to find what you are looking for.

Bottom line: Udacity is a compelling platform for learning tech skills, but the forums are barren and certain courses lack depth.

Website User Experience	Quality of Instruction	Amount and Depth of Content	Community Interaction and Support	Certificates, Career Services and Other Features	Total Score
4	4	3	2	4	17

#4

Khan Academy is an online learning portal built by MIT and Harvard Business Grad Salaman Khan. The site focuses on a younger demographic than the other top MOOC platforms, with many courses focusing on concepts students can expect to encounter in high school, middle school and grade school. Over the past year, Khan has expanded his site with more partner content and more videos on higher level math subjects and programming. Khan is in his element teaching math and he is more intelligible and engaging than the average professor you might encounter on Cousera. Still, it would behoove him to enlist the help of other educators to produce content in fields that lie a bit outside his areas of expertise.

The best part about Khan Academy site is that it has a huge number of high quality, interactive math exercises and a progress tracking system that helps students work toward mastery of math from basic arithmetic to calculus. The site also has a badge and point system that rewards users for watching videos and answering questions.

The Khan Academy website is sleek and responsive. Course materials are organized by subject area and are all easily accessible from a single menu. All of the materials are free and will likely remain that way since the site is nonprofit and its mission is to provide a free world class education to anyone anywhere.

Bottom Line: Khan Academy is a great place for kids to learn math and for adults to brush up, but students seeking depth should explore other platforms.

Website User Experience	Quality of Instruction	Amount and Depth of Content	Community Interaction and Support	Certificates, Career Services and Other Features	Total Score
4	4	3	2	3	16

#5

MIT OpenCourseWare is the dinosaur of online education. It’s old, enormous and parts that you wish were there are sometimes missing. MIT OCW's catalog of over over 2000 free courses continues to grow, keeping it relevant in the modern era of web learning. On the other hand, available materials continue to vary greatly from one course to another and many new courses are still missing key content like assignments, assignment solutions, texts or even lecture videos. The bar set by the new wave MOOC platforms is unrealistically high for OCW, which is more of a massive course archive than an interactive, ever-evolving product.

The OCW website has changed little over the past year and remains clean and reasonably responsive. The course search functions work well and let you find courses by subject area, department or course number and filter results by various features like whether the course has lecture videos or online texts available. OCW has never offered much in the way of interactivity or special features and that isn't likely to change as MIT increasingly focuses more on improving edX.

OCW doesn’t offer account registration so there is no personal user dashboard to keep track of your classes or forums to discuss material with other independent learners. You don’t get certificates or badges or any other sort of tangible reward for completing courseware; on OCW, knowledge is your reward. 

Bottom Line: MIT OCW is a treasure trove of high-level courseware, but missing content and lack of interactive features make it less appealing than modern MOOC platforms. 

Website User Experience	Quality of Instruction	Amount and Depth of Content	Community Interaction and Support	Certificates, Career Services and Other Features	Total Score
3	4	4	1	1	13