History
Massive Open Online Courses have been around for a while, debuting in 2007 as an online course available to anyone, by David Wiley at Utah State University.
2008: Dave Cormier from UPEI coined the term MOOC.
2011: the first very successful course, "Artificial Intelligence" by Sebastien Thrun and Peter Norvig from Stanford University; 160,000 people enrolled. Thrun and Norvig founded Udacity soon after, and thus the first MOOC "platform" was born, whereby any university could offer a MOOC.
2012: MIT and Harvard create EdX. The enrollment in Coursera, EdX and Udacity reaches nearly two million students.
2020: The number of unique users for the six major providers is more than 195 million.
2020: The number of students enrolled with Coursera for a specific degree doubled from the previous year, to 13,500.
2021: Coursera becomes a publicly-traded company, raising the company's market cap to $5.9 billion.