MOOC sign-ups doubled, hitting 35m in 2015
Today the SCMP reports that according to Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) aggregator, Class Central, there are around 4.2k MOOCs offered by more than 500 universities around the world, with the number of students who signed up for at least one course hitting more than 35m in 2015, roughly twice as many as in 2014. Hong Kong is at the forefront of MOOC growth, with most of the country's major universities offering free online courses on global platforms such as Coursera, edX, Udacity or Udemy. The fact that students can enrol in a course for free is clearly the main attraction, with Hau Kit-tai, professor of educational psychology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong stating “As MOOCs are free, they allow more window shopping, with students trying out one or two lessons before making a long-term commitment…This is much better than a student paying a high tuition for a certain programme, then finding out very quickly that the programme is not something she or he wants.”

New technology and ever-increasing choices make it easy for people to attend low-cost or free lessons via web classrooms