15 Most Valuable Learning Websites That Are Free
You know how passionate we are about learning, and we want to see you grow, thrive, and succeed for free. We hope you get value from this article.
01— iTunes U Free Courses
iTunesU is gaining a lot of momentum as a great alternative to traditional studying. The beauty about taking a course through iTunesU is it’s a seamless integration between your Apple devices — making studying anywhere, anytime, a possibility.
If you can listen to a podcast, you can work iTunes U. Many Universities use this platform to share their courses. What caught our mind was the Open Course Psychology with Professor Paul Bloom. He covers religion, hunger, lust, and much more.
Other genres of courses include Art and Architecture, Personal Finances and World History.
02— Harvard Extension
Imagine putting a Harvard qualification on your CV? Well, it’s a possibility with Harvard Extension where you can study virtually, from anywhere in the world — for free.
Some examples of free courses that you can take online include Justice, Humanitarian Response to Conflict and Disaster and Introduction to Family Engagement in Education.
As reported by Business Insider, you can “audit these classes for free or opt to pay $50-$200 for features like graded homework and certificates of completion that you can add to your resume or LinkedIn profile.”
03— Skill Share
Labelled the “Netflix of learning,” Skill Share has over 10,000 courses available, and you can sign up for a 2-month free trial. You can learn a lot in 2-months! But even better, is that once your trial is over — it’s only $2.49 a month!
We loved the “Introduction to 3D Printing: An Easy Start to Your First 3D Design” given by designer and technologist, Lauren Slowik.
One of the most popular courses of 2020 was Still Life Photography: Capturing Stories of Everyday Objects at Home by Sean Dalton and iPhone Photography: How to Shoot & Edit Conceptual Photos on Your Phone by Amelie Satzger.
04— Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Ergonomics in Action, Psychology of Personal Growth and Digital Design are just some of the FREE courses you can do through the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
HKUST was ranked Asia’s number one for 2 years in a row in QS Asian University Rankings 2011 and 2012.
Through this dynamic facility, we recommend “Making Sense of the News: News Literacy Lessons for Digital Citizens” taught by several highly reputable lecturers. It’s a 6-week course helping you to discern fake news, propaganda, hoaxes, satire, advertising, and rumors from the real-deal.
05— Coursera
One of the most well-known free online learning portals is this one, which offers over 3,000 courses!
The platform joins hands with 200+ leading universities and companies and offers anything from a 1-day course to a 12-month course.
The only time you will need to pay for anything, is if you decide to get the certificate to confirm that you’ve completed and passed the course, but if you’re doing it just for yourself — you’re good to start right now!
We really liked the sound of Foundations of Mindfulness, a 5-star rated course given by Dr. Elizabeth Slator.
06— Udacity
Not all courses offered on Udacity are free, but a large portion are — so you’ll need to sift through them carefully to find out which one best suits you.
As reported on Guru99, “The courses offered by Udacity are highly interactive, like quizzes and exercise. Students can get benefit from a project review system which produces detailed expert project review quickly.”
Some options available are Intro to the Design of Everyday Things, Introduction to Virtual Reality and Networking for Web Developers.
07— Google Digital Garage
We raved about this one in our video Top 10 Most Useful Online Courses That are FREE, explaining that there are over 100 courses to choose from. With Google Digital Garage there are zero-time limits, unlimited access, beautifully set out modules and videos.
Courses include Managing your time effectively, creating a long-term social media plan and the one we mentioned, Fundamentals of Digital Marketing, where you’ll learn to identify your online goals, how to build an online presence, how to market your online presence and how to analyze and adapt to online change.
08— Stanford University
The online portal for Stanford University is well laid out, easy to follow and tough to choose which of the amazing courses you’ll begin with… and all of this at no cost to you.
There are free courses covering Arts & Humanities, Engineering, Education, and Health & Medicine. Right now, you could register for the 60-day “Introduction to Internet of Things” course, or you could sign up for Congenital Hypothyroidism: What Every Primary Care Provider Needs to Know.
09— LinkedIn Learning
When we went to check out some of the courses available on LinkedIn, the name that caught our eye was Seth Godin. And if you’ve watched our videos, you’ll know we’ve spoken about him quite a bit.
He offers a quick course titled Creativity at Work: A Short Course from Seth Godin and we watched it immediately. It was worth it.
You can sign up for free for one month to access over 15,000 courses and thereafter it’s around $10 a month.
As Seth Godin says, “If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.”
10— Open Culture Online Courses
There are 1,700 free courses to choose from if you head to Open Culture. As they say on their website, “… you’ll find 200 free philosophy courses, 105 free history courses, 170 free computer science courses, 85 free physics courses and 55 Free Literature Courses in the collection, and that’s just beginning to scratch the surface.”
We particularly liked the Creative Reading and Writing by William S. Burroughs and Growing Up in the Universe.
11— Lifehack Fast Track Class
What we appreciated about this method of free online learning was what Lifehack called their courses — “Life Multipliers.”
Basically, adding value to your life through additional studying.
Costing you nothing, you can start these courses today:
– No More Procrastination
– Focus Like a Top Achiever
– Spark Your Learning Genius
And they’re all quick and easy to follow. You’ve got nothing to lose, so give this site a try and enhance your marketability.
12— Alison
You could be one of 20-million students who benefit from Alison. These learners come from 195 different countries, and they’ve chosen courses from over 3,500 offered.
As the site affirms, they “believe that free education, more than anything, has the power to break through boundaries and transform lives.” And we couldn’t agree more.
Some of their most popular courses include the Diploma in Workplace Safety and Health, Free Online Writing Skills Courses and the Diploma in E-Commerce Web Development.
13— eDX
Just today, around 400,000 people are learning through eDX. With more than 160 member universities, this is one site that will not leave you disappointed.
Their vision says it all:
“As a global nonprofit, we’re relentlessly pursuing our vision of a world where every learner can access education to unlock their potential, without the barriers of cost or location.”
We were drawn to the Protecting Children in Humanitarian Settings course, which is a 12-week program only requiring a commitment of 3–5 hours a week. This is just one of over 3,000 courses available.
14— MIT OpenCourseWare
Very active on Twitter, we love that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is continually striving to bring us the best in free online learning.
You can follow them yourself, @MITOCW. A recent Tweet said, “We are so excited to partner with Julie Shah & David Kaiser to help share materials from their project on Social & Ethical Responsibilities of Computing. Look for more information this fall!” So, that’s something to look out for!
Many of their courses are available in Chinese, Korean and Turkish.
15— Academic Earth
They launched their first free course in 2009 and have never stopped growing. Courses range from accounting, and management to social science and humanities and everything in between.
We love their curated playlists which delve deeply into a group of topics, for example, Love Is In the Air — Perspectives on emotion, love, dating, marriage, and sex from psychology, English, and economics or You Are What You Eat — A variety of perspectives on food and drink, from French Culture to Cannibalism.
Aluxers, we loved compiling this article for you, and we hope you gain so much value from it.
We’d really appreciate it if you took the time to follow us, and of course, a bunch of claps if you enjoyed reading.
