How to Attend Free Online Courses

Four Methods:Finding the Right CourseTaking Literal University Courses OnlineLearning to Code OnlineKeeping Up with Online CourseworkCommunity Q&A

Online learning is proliferating. Web-based classes are increasingly offered by universities, other accredited educational institutions, and informal communities that advocate the spread of specific skills. Many online courses are free, and the quality of these classes are improving. To take advantage of these opportunities, find a class, stick to the lesson plan, and collaborate with others online to learn or better understand almost anything you’re interested in.

Method 1

Finding the Right Course

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   Decide what type of course you’re hoping to take. You have plenty of options. Some of the most common and accessible courses will help you learn a new language, brush up on your art history, gain practical business knowledge, and even learn how to code and otherwise develop the world wide web.
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   Check out Khan Academy. Khan Academy is a global online education source that can be useful for people of all ages, offering classes in math, science, computer programming, history, economics, and more. Khan Academy was one of the first free online course providers, and has steadily grown. It has always been free for everyone. As a non-profit organization, it runs on volunteers and donors who share their knowledge and expertise.^[1]

   • Courses include practice exercises and instructional videos, and you take them at a self-directed pace.
   • Khan Academy’s online interface identifies your strengths and weaknesses and adapts coursework specifically to your needs.
   • Khan Academy also offers online materials specifically for teachers and other educators, that can help monitor in-class performance generally, or focus on a particular student’s progress.
   • Khan Academy’s courses have been translated into dozens of languages, and the website itself can be set to Spanish, French, Brazilian, English, or Portuguese.
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   Learn a new language. There are plenty of online language-learning opportunities out there, but Duolingo offers perhaps the most user-friendly and enjoyable language courses that are entirely free. Duolingo literally makes it fun to learn a language by providing an addictive, game-like platform in which you advance based on point and level achievements.^[2]

   • Lessons include practice speaking, listening, reading, writing, and multiple choice questions.
   • Your work is instantly checked and you’re immediately told what content you missed. You will then be prompted to repeat a task with emphasis on the content you are struggling with.
   • Duolingo also offers a fun and interactive app to use on your phone, meaning you can be more productive in your down time too!
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   Take business classes courtesy of the United States government! The Small Business Administration (SBA) is an independent agency of the federal government that was created specifically to assist and advocate on behalf of small businesses. The SBA’s goal is to help people build and grow small businesses. They offer many business classes, which can be found on the Learning Center page of the SBA website.^[3]

   • Examples of classes currently offered include “Understanding Your Customer,” “Buying a Business,” and “Taking Your High-Tech Product to Market.”
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   Take a class offered by the Open University. OpenLearn is a website that houses a collection of classes in various disciplines. While many of OpenLearn’s classes are academic in nature, some are geared towards everyday skill development.^[4]

   • Class categories include Health, Sports, & Psychology; Money & Management; People, Politics & Law; and more.
   • A few examples of specific classes include “Forensic Psychology,” “Start Writing Fiction,” “Introduction to Cyber Security,” and “What is Poetry?”

Method 2

Taking Literal University Courses Online

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   Take a university class for free! Many highly-respected universities offer the materials used in their courses online for free. These include some of the most prestigious universities in the world, such as the University of California at Berkeley and Yale University. While you can find information on the courses and materials available for free on these and other university’s websites, universities are increasingly getting involved with collaborative online course-providers. Further, some universities, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, make material available through several different online organizations.

   • Find a class with the Open Education Consortium. This consortium is a network of individuals and organizations that exist to provide open, collaborative, and innovative educational materials – including full courses – for anyone, for free. As a non-profit, they treat education as a social good, and seek to make as much content as possible available for you and anyone else that’s interested in taking online classes.^[5]
   • On the OEC website, search for classes based on the institution that facilitates them, the language you wish to take a course in, or the thematic category of classes they host.
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   Take a class with edX. Some of the world’s most respected universities offer free courses online. MIT, Harvard, and some other universities have teamed together to create an online platform called edX, which offers all sorts of extremely high quality classes online – including online learning tools, videos, games, and even a 3D virtual molecule builder – all for free!^[6]

   • edX courses are taken at your pace, wherever you’re most comfortable, and virtual classrooms are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
   • You can either audit courses, or earn a certificate of achievement based on assignments and other coursework.
   • edX incorporates social learning by facilitating peer-to-peer coursework to facilitate cooperation with other students taking the courses with you.
   • Examples of Harvard-facilitated classes include overviews of research done by members of the Harvard community, focusing on certain fields of study. These include courses geared towards law, the science of cooking, neuroscience, and politics.^[7]
   • Examples of MIT’s edX-affiliated courses (called MITx courses) include lessons on aerodynamics, quantum mechanics, quantitative biology, and introduction to game design.^[8]
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   Check out MIT’s OpenCourseWare. OCW is an initiative to make all the materials used in MIT’s undergraduate and graduate courses freely available online.^[9] Enough material is made available to effectively take the course, though you self-direct your progress through the material. You can get syllabi, necessary software, materials broken into units, and access to online study groups.

   • Use a study guide laid out by a blog called aGupieWare to guide you through a four month plan to complete MIT’s extremely popular (and free!) Introduction to Computer Science course.^[10]
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   Take a class on Coursera. Coursera offers many sorts of classes that are designed and run by professors from the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and the Johns Hopkins University, among others. While the full experience (which includes graded assignments and a certificate of completion) has a cost, high quality lectures and non-graded assignments are freely available on the Coursera website.^[11]

   • Coursera’s class list is extremely substantial. They offer courses in the Arts and Humanities, Business, Computer Science, Data Science, Life Sciences, Math and Logic, Personal Development, Physical Science and Engineering, Social Sciences, and Languages.
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   Avoid for-profit online universities. Many universities that are predominantly or exclusively online are primarily businesses whose main goal is to earn a profit. These universities are not free, but often advertise themselves aggressively, promising large amounts of financial aid for students. Acquiring federal financial aid money is the basis of these businesses’ financial model.^[12]

   • The quality of the courses offered by predominantly online, for-profit universities is very low.
   • Examples of for-profit online universities include DeVry University, Kaplan, and the University of Phoenix, which was found by a federal investigation to systematically operate in a misleading manner and has been fined millions of dollars for doing so.

Method 3

Learning to Code Online

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   Code with Khan Academy! Khan Academy offers several web development and computer programming courses. Learn to design creative content and build your own webpages with today’s most popular online languages.^[13]

   • Learn to draw and animate with an intro to JavaScript. In another class, learn how to make 3D graphics, menu screens, and games.
   • Make your own webpage while learning to use HTML and CSS. (HTML is the language with which you surround a webpage’s content to determine headings, lists, tables, and other text formatting. CSS is the language that also helps style pages by specifying colors, fonts, layouts, etc.^[14]) Later, you can combine knowledge learned in multiple courses to make your webpages interactive.
   • Learn to store, search, and otherwise handle data with SQL, a popular data managing software that is commonly used in both apps and within data-generating institutions.
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   Plan a complete computer science curriculum with aGupieWare. While there are plenty of courses and programs available online, it can be hard to organize a series of courses into a coherent curriculum – that’s where aGupieWare comes in. This website is actually a blog on applications, technology, and politics. Use their guide to help you complete all of the free online courses necessary to earn the equivalent skills and knowledge you would derive from a bachelor’s degree in computer science. ^[15]

   • aGupieWare’s proposed curriculum is based on the course lists and degree requirements of the most respects computer science departments in the world. They simply outline the best free computer programming courses you can take, from the best institutions, and recommend the best order to do so.
   • Don’t worry about having any prerequisite computer science experience. aGupieWare’s proposed curriculum assumes only a willingness to learn, and math and reading skills equal to that of a high school education.
   • The entire curriculum proposes 15 courses, including 3 introductory classes, 7 core courses, and 5 electives. The curriculum will familiarize you with the field of computer science and a more specific understanding of data structures, algorithms, programming languages, operating systems, networking, data communications, systems engineering, software development, and more.
   • aGupieWare also recommends a list of electives that can help you advance your knowledge of whichever specialization you choose. Electives include electrical engineering and robotics, software development and programming, computer architecture and hardware design, mathematics and cryptography, or networking and applications.
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   Enroll in Code Academy. Code Academy can teach you to code, with courses interactively adjusting themselves to your pace. It offers programs in a wide variety of programming languages, has been used by over 25 million people around the world, and has been widely recognized as a dependable source of coding expertise.^[16]

   • See the Code Academy website to read brief overviews of each of the courses they offer. These overviews outline the workflow you’ll follow during each course.
   • Courses include training on how to program with JavaScript, host web images on Dropbox, read and write with Ruby, problem shoot HTTP errors, use data software Rails, make a website with HTML5 and CSS3, learn Python, operate SQL, use DevTools, and more.

Method 4

Keeping Up with Online Coursework

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   Stay organized. It is important to have a place to keep all the educational material you collect during your course. Have a clearly named folder on your desktop with all the electronic files you acquire, and have a tangible folder to hold printouts and notes.
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   Familiarize yourself with the portal. Online courses will almost always have a portal or dashboard that offers a personalized page you can access by enrolling and/or logging in. Platforms will vary widely. Get used to the online interface as soon as you begin a class by spending time simply examining all of the pages, sections, and links associated with your class.

   • These user-specific (or class-specific) page with likely provide the materials you need (or information on how to get these materials).
   • Take advantage of supplementary material. These will include links to outside references and other helpful materials.
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   Participate in the collaborative aspect of online learning. If they hold classes that you can video conference in on, definitely do so! Many classes will also organize chatrooms or blogs that are open to others in the same course. Use these to ask questions or begin conversations about course material.

   • Join study groups. Study groups will likely include video meetings or live chat sessions. If there is not already a study group of one sort or another associated with your class, start one! You and many of your classmates will benefit from collaborating, and will likely learn the course material more quickly.