Our Ranking of Popular Online & Distance Learning Graduates

At just 15 years old Mongolian teenager Battushig Myanganbayar was one of 340 students out of 150,000 to earn a perfect score in Circuits and Electronics, a sophomore-level class at M.I.T. and the first Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC. MOOC’s are online courses offered for free or almost free by educational institutions around the globe. Myanganbayar’s remarkable talents don’t stop there. To help his fellow classmates also complete the course Myanganbayar wrote and filmed YouTube tutorials guiding his classmates through the trickiest part of the course and translating the American English into their native Mongolian. The ‘boy genius’ went on to apply to MIT and is currently still studying there with a focus on changing the world for the better.

While perhaps not a household name, Charles K. Kao is part of the reason you can be online today at all. Ka, known as the "Godfather of Broadband", the "Father of Fiber Optics", and the "Father of Fiber Optic Communications", laid the groundwork for fiber optic telecommunications and therefore the internet. He completed a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1965 from the University of London as an external student.