Just four months since officially launching, online education startup Coursera says it’s hit the one million mark for enrolled students.
In a blog post Thursday, the company, which reported 680,000 students less than a month ago, said its students come from every country in the world. About 39 percent of students are from the U.S., followed by Brazil, India, China, Canada and the U.K.
Coursera partners with universities and colleges around the world to offer massive open online courses (or MOOCs) taught by leading professors. Four weeks ago, it said that it’s partnering with a dozen new schools, bringing its total to 16. In addition to elite U.S. universities, including Stanford, Princeton and the University of Michigan, it has added international schools such as the University of Edinburgh, University of Toronto and Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), to its list of partners.
Since its earliest days, Coursera has attracted international students and being available to people around the globe has been a core value of the company’s. Nearly all of the company’s 1,000 videos have been captioned into more than 20 languages and, with the addition to EPFL, the startup will offer its first non-English course, an introduction to programming taught in French.
To date, the company has raised $ 22 million from New Enterprise Associates and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the California Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania.
