Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are popular. This much we know. Who are these students, and what do they want? Some early inquiries into this by two major MOOC providers offer a few hints. Among 14,045 students in the Coursera Machine Learning course who responded to a demographic survey, half were professionals who currently held jobs in the tech industry. The largest chunk, 41 percent, said they were professionals currently working in the software industry; another 9 percent said they were professionals working in non-software areas of the computing and information technology industries. Nearly 20 percent were graduate students, and another 11.6 percent were undergraduates. The remaining registrants were either unemployed (3.5 percent), employed somewhere other than the tech industry (2.5 percent), enrolled in a K-12 school (1 percent), or “other” (11.5 percent). Across all Coursera courses, 74 percent of registrants reside outside the United States.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/06/05/early-demographic-data-hints-what-type-student-takes-mooc
