The 10 Most Popular Courses on Coursera in 2017 (and 2,000 Courses You Can Take for Free in January, 2018)

Back in 2012, Coursera started offering MOOCS (Massive Open Online Courses) to the world at large. And they’ve since amassed some 28 million registered users, a catalogue of 2,000 courses, and reams of data about what people want to learn. In the waning days of December, Coursera published a list of their 1o most popular courses of 2017. (Find below, and enroll in any of these courses for free.) From this list, it drew some larger conclusions about trends in education and technology.

The list shows, writes Nikhil Sinha, Coursera’s Chief Content Officer, that “cutting-edge tech skills continue to be the most sought after in online education.” Artificial intelligence–encompassing Machine LearningNeural Networks and Deep Learning–topped the list of courses. Meanwhile “Blockchain has also burst onto the scene, putting Princeton’s Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency course at number five on the list.” But, Sinha adds, it’s “not just technology skills that are trending.” The “basic learning and information-retention skills taught in our popular Learning How to Learn course are extremely sought-after by people of all ages.” The same applies to the problem-solving skills taught by Stanford’s Introduction to Mathematical Thinking.

You can review the Top 10 list below, and enroll in any of those regularly-offered courses.

  1. Machine Learning: A primer from Stanford University on getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed.
  2. Neural Networks and Deep Learning: Building on the course above, this course will teach you to feed a computer system a lot of data, which it can then use to make decisions about other data.
  3. Learning How to Learn: Powerful Mental Tools to Help You Master Tough Subjects: The most popular MOOC ever, this course developed by Dr. Barbara Oakley gives you access to the invaluable learning techniques used by experts in art, music, literature, math, science, sports, and many other disciplines.
  4. Introduction to Mathematical Thinking: Stanford University will teach you a style of thinking that will help you think outside the box and solve real problems in the everyday world.
  5. Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: From Princeton University comes a course that explains what is special about Bitcoin, and how it works at a technical level.
  6. Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python): The University of Michigan offers a course everyone should take–a primer on the basics of programming computers, using Python.
  7. Algorithms, Part I: Princeton’s course covers “essential information that every serious programmer needs to know about algorithms and data structures, with emphasis on applications and scientific performance analysis of Java implementations.”
  8. English for Career Development: Created by the University of Pennsylvania, this course is for non-native English speakers “interested in advancing their careers in the global marketplace.” Along the way, you’ll learn about the job search, application, and interview process in the U.S., and also explore your own global career path.
  9. Neural Networks for Machine Learning:  The University of Toronto gives you the chance to “learn about artificial neural networks and how they’re being used for machine learning, as applied to speech and object recognition, image segmentation, modeling language and human motion, etc.”
  10. Financial Markets: Created by Yale’s Robert Shiller (winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics), this course offers an overview of the financial markets, which allow human society to manage risks and foster enterprise. It includes an introduction to risk management and behavioral finance principles underlying the securities, insurance, and banking industries.

Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses, it helps support Open Culture.

Related Content:

Learning How to Learn: The Most Popular MOOC of All Time

New Deep Learning Courses Released on Coursera, with Hope of Teaching Millions the Basics of Artificial Intelligence

Coursera Partners with Leading Universities to Offer Master’s Degrees at a More Affordable Price


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