The Internet is full of information, from news, to wikis, to video tutorials. With a quick YouTube search, you’re sure to find step by step ways on learning the guitar, fixing your plumbing, or making cake!
Education is a self-served dish with an internet connection. Now, you can even be licensed or receive a diploma for it! These sites offer online courses that only require a computer, internet connection, and your desire to learn.
- Coursera
Coursera partners with universities, organizations, and museums around the world for their offered courses. You can have certificates from renowned universities like MIT, IBM, or Yale!
With the abundance of partnerships they have, you’ll be able to find a wide variety of topics and specializations to choose from. They have a fee for their courses but you can apply for a scholarship through their website.
- Khan Academy
Khan Academy is also a site that boasts a lot of variety in their courses. They offer educational content for all ages, mainly for kids and teenagers covering primary to tertiary education. Khan Academy also offers resources for teachers and parents too, assisting them on how to teach their students and children.
Khan Academy is a nonprofit organization and their content is free.
- Open Culture Online Courses
If you want to go direct to a university or organization for a specific course topic but don’t want to sift through all of them, Open Culture has an organized list of 1000 educational resources. These vary from lectures, videos, podcasts, and reading materials from different universities around the world.
Open Culture list is a useful tool in you’re looking for resources in a specific area of study.
- Udemy
Udemy is similar in concept to Coursera offering courses but with an option to build custom lessons from it. This site can be helpful for teachers by having easily customizable courses to fit their students’ needs.
The site works with schools and professors to offer quality content. Udemy offers both paid and free content.
- Academic Earth
Academic Earth is another site that hosts a lot of courses from renowned schools. They list their offerings by subject and school, so you’ll find what you like easier here.
The courses that Academic Earth host are free.
- edX
edX has access to over 2000 free online courses from leading institutions around the world. They offer a wide variety of topics and have certifications for it. They offer a mix of paid and free content.
- Alison
Though not as diverse as the former sites, Alison offers free education certification in a number of areas. Their top ones are business, tech, and health. It’s a great option for people looking for certification to be used on their current education as Alison offers school curriculum courses.
- University Websites
You can of course still go direct to the university’s website! However, most universities only offer a fraction of the variety of courses offered at the previous websites. Learning direct however can be more efficient on acquiring your certificate afterward. Here are some of the renowned universities offering online courses for free:
- Stanford Online
- Harvard Extension
- Open Yale Courses
- UC Berkeley Class Central
- MIT OpenCourseWare
- Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative
You’re all set to learn on your own now! Online learning has its own sets of struggles to go through. Don’t be intimidated if you feel like you are lagging behind, online courses give you the freedom to go over resources until you get a grasp of the topic and move on. Lastly, use the internet to search for related resources that are taught or are shown in a different light to help you learn better.
Remember, unlike standard school where you are guided and assisted by teachers, online learning depends highly on your ability to motivate yourself in pursuing a course. Be consistent, keep on focusing on your current course activity and you’ll have your certificate in no time!