In a few years, massive open online courses, most commonly referred to as MOOCs, have exploded in popularity. These online courses provide high quality content taught by the best professors in their respective fields. With more that 20 million students, Coursera is one of the leaders of the MOOC movement. Coursera provides a platform that connects leading universities with students worldwide. I took my first Coursera course back in 2012, and since then I try to take one course a month.

In 2015, Coursera has around 1000 courses offered by 100+ universities in more than 10 languages. With this huge number of courses, it became difficult to decide on what course to take.

In this tutorial, I will combine coursera data together with social media data to assess the popularity of courses. To to this, I will use the Coursera API to retrieve the course catalogue, I will use the sharecount.com API to get social media metrics for each course, and I will use python's pandas library to query and order the courses by popularity.

The source code for this tutorial can be found in this github repository.