Online learning courses are booming during the pandemic, with Coursera adding 10M new users from mid-March to mid-May, seven times the pace in the previous year
The pioneering online learning networks offer hard-earned lessons for what works and what doesn't with online education. Tweets: @stevelohr Tweets: Steve Lohr / @stevelohr : The renaissance of the MOOCs: They're getting a jolt of growth from the coronavirus economy. But they had found firm footing before, learning hard-earned lessons about what works and doesn't online. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
MOOCs spent years being written off — related coverage in April 2020 noted they were among the tech ideas mostly dismissed as overhyped or unworkable. The pandemic flipped that: Coursera's 10M new users in two months is the demand spike arriving on top of a business that had already found footing before COVID hit.
The surge also set up what came next in the coverage arc: Udemy raised $50M at a $2B valuation just weeks before lockdowns, and within ten months Coursera would file its S-1 showing revenue up 59% but losses widening to $66.8M — the growth was real, the profitability wasn't yet.
First-order effects
- Coursera absorbs a sevenfold acceleration in signups from mid-March to mid-May, straining its capacity to convert pandemic-driven free learners into paying ones.
- Udemy enters the same demand wave with fresh capital and a 150,000-course catalog, making it Coursera's most directly comparable rival rather than a niche marketplace.
Second-order effects
- Investor attention follows the users: global education-tech funding roughly tripled to $12.58B in 2020 from $4.81B in 2019, as venture capital chased the growth this article documents.
- Universities and corporate training buyers face a credible alternative mid-crisis, forcing institutions that had resisted online delivery to license or partner with platforms instead of building their own.
Third-order effects
- The open question flagged in the coverage — whether remote learning usage drops as in-person teaching returns — determines whether MOOCs keep their gains or become another hype-cycle casualty; Coursera's widened losses suggest scale alone doesn't close the gap.
- If retention holds, online course platforms consolidate into default credentialing and reskilling infrastructure, with the 2020 funding boom pricing them as permanent fixtures rather than pandemic stopgaps.
The trend: The pandemic converted MOOCs from dismissed overhype into mainstream education infrastructure, pulling Coursera and Udemy toward public markets before their unit economics caught up.