Since 2011, when Stanford University launched its first “massive open online courses”, these free, internet-enabled programmes have cropped up everywhere, engaging millions of users. The largest Mooc providers ?– Coursera, Udemy, Udacity, and EdX – offer free tuition, supplied by universities, often to hundreds of thousands of students at a time. But just a year after Moocs really started taking off, offering the promise of real disruption to the centuries-old higher-education business, user growth has started to slow.

Until May this year, visitors to Moocs were increasing rapidly. But since then the picture has become markedly less rosy. Over the past quarter the major Mooc providers in the US have seen stagnation or slowing growth in visitor numbers. The “summer slump” across the education sector might normally explain this kind of drop. However, this comes even as the major platforms have supplemented their offerings with more new courses and high-profile partner universities.

The decline, however, has not been universal, and exceptions to the trend may offer hints about how the market for Moocs could develop. Available data on visits to the major Mooc sites between November 2012 and August 2013 indicate that visits from India have doubled over the past nine months. India still has only about a third the number of Mooc users as the US. But that still makes it the largest market for Moocs outside America, even though it has only a fraction of the broadband penetration. As a largely English-speaking country, India illustrates how Moocs might develop in emerging markets if more content was available in Vietnamese, Mandarin, Indonesian or Portuguese.