If you want to develop new skills, brush up on old skills, and increase your earning potential, there are several options for free courses online! This post offers an overview of what’s available to anyone looking for a little free education.
Keep in mind that free education programs don’t offer diplomas or degrees upon completion (including free classes from accredited colleges and universities), but some will offer certification and even college credits.
Free online classes are a good starting point if you’re considering a full degree program, but you’re not sure exactly what you want to pursue. You can dabble in a few things for free to help you decide.
New knowledge and skills are available for the taking – whether just for enrichment, fresh skills to add to your resume, or if you want to start a business. The following companies and universities offer free online courses, lectures, and other learning resources.
Free Courses Online
Academic Earth
Academic Earth provides a compilation of free online courses and lectures from universities in eight subject areas including Art and Design, Business, and Engineering, and over 50 related fields.
Alison
Alison offers over 750 free courses from various online education publishers.
Codecademy
Learn to code for free, in dozens of languages. If you want to learn some Python, PHP, or HTML, Codecademy is the site for you.
Duolingo
If learning a language is a goal, Duolingo can help you get there. They offer free courses online in over a dozen languages. All of the courses are mobile-friendly language learning games that you can consume in small bits as time allows.
edX
Founded by Harvard University and MIT, edX is a nonprofit learning resource offering courses in subject areas from Architecture to Social Sciences from some of the best schools and organizations in the world. They also offer some high school classes, including advanced placement (AP) courses. Some edX courses offer you a certificate, and some are eligible for university credits.
GCFLearnFree.org (Goodwill Community Foundation)
Offers over 125 tutorials covering basic skills (Internet 101 and arithmetic) and many tutorials on social media, Microsoft Office, Web search tactics, and using cloud-based resources. If you need to brush up on any computer-related skills this site has what you need.
Harvard Extension School
Harvard University has an extension school that offers some free courses online, plus 700 others at a reasonable cost. There are live courses and text-based online courses in many academic disciplines.
Khan Academy
Provides courses in math, computing, arts and humanities, and more. High school and college students can also prep for tests like the MCAT, SAT, GMAT, and others.
MIT OpenCourseWare
Yes, this is a catalog of free university courses from the world-famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You can browse by topic and subtopic. In addition to some complete courses, they have course materials and online textbooks available. MIT also provides a section for high school students and teachers.
Open Culture
This site offers access to thousands of free online courses, lectures, textbooks, audio books, and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) around the world. Think of Open Culture as an online education directory. You will find resources for a wide range of practical training, like coding, and academics, like psychology and history.
Stanford Online
This is another world-class university that offers course material online for anyone to use. Their online offerings include professional education and college classes relevant to dozens of majors. If you want to be an entrepreneur, Stanford offers plenty of great courses.
Udemy
Udemy offers over 40,000 courses in dozens of subject areas. Many of those courses are free, but most are paid. You can learn quite a bit for free or at modest cost by selecting the right mix of courses. You can search by category, IT and Software for example, then by subtopic, such as programming. Make sure to select the All Courses option to sort the free courses.
Yale Courses
Access a selection of introductory courses for free. Yale Online Courses are organized by academic discipline, over 20 of them. This is a great resource for free education, but you cannot earn a degree or certificate or diploma from Yale’s free classes.
These are just some of the free courses online that are available to you! Please share in comments if you have experience with any of these schools or providers.
