Coursera, founded in the heyday of the MOOC hype, is one of the world’s largest online course providers and boasts an active catalog of over 12,000 courses, up from 8,000+ last year.
Boosted by the momentum provided by the COVID-19 pandemic to online education companies, Coursera went public in March, 2021. Class Central’s analysis of Coursera’s IPO filing showed that the company made $293.5M revenue in 2020. In 2021, the company made $415.3M. To learn more about Coursera, read our analysis of their business: A Deep Dive Into Coursera’s Financials.
In 2022, Coursera’s stock dropped by 20% due to a degree enrollments slowdown in the US as well as headwinds for their consumer and business segments in Europe.
Coursera experienced strong growth in 2023, adding 24 million new learners and increasing revenue by 21% to $636 million, driven primarily by its consumer business and tech partnerships. However, the company faced challenges in early 2024, revising down its revenue projections and experiencing a significant stock price drop, while focusing on expanding its AI-related offerings and proprietary content to drive future growth.
At one time, Coursera’s courses were completely free. But as time went on and Coursera focused on monetization, graded assignments and certificates were put behind a paywall. Eventually the courses went from free to “free to audit”.
But an investigation by Class Central found that there are still 1,700 completely free courses on Coursera (minus the certificate). If you have trouble signing up for the audit mode, please read our guide on How to Sign up for Coursera Courses for Free.
Top Free Courses on Coursera
Here’s a compilation of Coursera’s 250 most popular free online courses of all time, based on enrollment numbers:
- Enrollments range from 211K to 4.7M. There are 22 courses with over 1M enrollments
- To date, these courses have garnered over 130M enrollments, with an average of 522K enrollments per course
- 230 of the courses are in English, 16 in Spanish, 3 in Portuguese, and 1 in French
- They have received 114K reviews on Class Central, with an average rating of 4.2/5.0
- 146 courses cater to beginners, while 31 are geared towards intermediate learners
Here are some of the top courses:
- The Science of Well-Being from Yale University
- Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects from Deep Teaching Solutions
- Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python) from University of Michigan
- Foundations: Data, Data, Everywhere from Google
- English for Career Development from University of Pennsylvania
- Foundations of Project Management from Google
- Financial Markets from Yale University
- Technical Support Fundamentals from Google
- Successful Negotiation: Essential Strategies and Skills from University of Michigan
- First Step Korean from Yonsei University
