Never Miss a Course With Class Central's "Follow" Button for Education

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Feb. 29, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Class Central, a search engine and reviews site for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), announces the official release of their "Follow" feature.  A Twitter-like Follow button enables registered users to customize their Class Central experience by following universities, subjects, and course providers. This new feature alerts users about new and upcoming online courses based on their follows.

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The Follow button is the first of its kind in the online education space, allowing users to pick and choose the topics and institutions that interest them. MOOCs, which rose to prominence a little over 4 years ago, have grown to a staggering 5000 courses from 600 universities around the world, data from Class Central shows. New courses are being added every day, making it hard to keep up with topics of interest. By using the Follow button, students receive a personalized digest of new courses as well as upcoming course recommendations delivered to their inbox.  For example, followers of the "Artificial Intelligence" subject received a recent notification about Google's Deep Learning course from Udacity, one of the many sites Class Central offers reviews for.

Registered users with more than 10 Follows are able to unlock a special personalized course recommendations page. This feature is currently in beta testing, with plans to roll out to the general public in the coming months.

The button, which went live earlier this year, has been a huge hit with Class Central users with 100,000 follows within a short period of time. The Follow button joins an already advanced MOOC Tracker, which allows users to mark courses as interested and receive course notifications and reminders.

The online education space is rapidly growing. In 2013, e-Learning was a $56.2 billion industry, with predictions doubling that in 2015. By 2019, nearly half of all college courses will be e-Learning based; while currently over 46% of students are enrolled in at least one online course. As of Feb 2016, over 5000 courses are being offered by 600 universities around the world and 40 million students have enrolled for at least one course.  A third of the courses are in the field of Business and Computer Science with 75% of the courses in English. It was reported that over 41% of Fortune 500 companies use some form of educational technology to instruct employees.

As a leading voice in the online education space, Class Central's founder Dhawal Shah has published articles in media such as TechCrunch and EdSurge. "The online education landscape is evolving rapidly. For the last four years, Class Central has strived to help learners understand this change and make informed online learning decisions," says Shah. "The first of its kind 'Follow' button for education with its personalized notifications allows students to stay on top of the latest courses without overwhelming them with information."

Class Central also crowdsources reviews for MOOCs, which go beyond just a rating to truly gauge the course. Combined with the fact that Class Central collects three times more information (metadata) about courses than other aggregators, learners are well equipped to make an informed decision on whether a particular course is right for them. Registered users can build their own catalogue of courses and create an online transcript to record their progress.

Class Central's leadership in the MOOC space is borne out by their 2015 data:

-Two million students used Class Central in 2015 to help them decide which online course to take next.
-Students wrote more than 7,000 reviews on their website
-Students added courses 300,000 times to MOOC Tracker
-Website visitors ran 250,000 searches
-Class Central's influential blog, MOOC Report, is the most read and referenced publication in the online education space, with monthly readership topping at 50,000 readers.
-According to Similar Web, Class Central is the #2 source of referral traffic to Coursera

Learn more about Class Central at www.class-central.com.

About Class Central

As the leading aggregator of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), Class Central presents curated and student-reviewed high quality courses to help learners make informed online learning decisions. With a simple interface and thousands of reviews, we have helped 4 million people decide which online course to take next. For more information, visit www.class-central.com.

Media Contact: Sara Gardner, 1-888-317-4687 ext. 702, Email

SOURCE Class Central

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