Coursera

coursera.org

Provides access to courses offered by over 200 universities and companies. The courses themselves are free, but you can pay to earn a course certificate. By paying, you also get access to additional quizzes and projects. On a larger scale, portions of Master’s programs are available as well as full online degrees.

In addition to courses, Guided Projects are available which teach job-relevant skills and industry tools. These start at $9.99 and else result in a certificate. Similarly, professional certificates are available.

Coursera is a great option for self-motivated learning. It is not necessarily a useful tool for reference or review, though. Based on the 4-6 week timeline for courses, one could use Coursera over breaks for personal enrichment.

MIT Open Courseware

https://ocw.mit.edu/

For select courses, lecture recordings, notes, and assignments can be found on this platform. You can search for topics by topic, course number, or department. The readings and textbooks used for each course are also linked. Sometimes a downloadable link is provided for textbooks.

Many of the courses provided by MIT are also provided by the University of St Andrews. As a result, this site is particularly useful and relevant. Below are the departments which have courses on the website.

OnlineCourses.com

https://www.onlinecourses.com/

On this website, you can find more than 500 accredited free online university classes. The layout of this website is similar to that of third party comparators such as kayak.com (for flights) or Zoopla (for housing).

Start by selecting degree (eg Bachelor’s), category (eg Liberal Arts & Humanities), and subject (eg English)

Then, you will be taken to a page that lists online courses offered by various universities:

While most courses will still require registration, all are free and don’t have any pre-requisites. This is a great option for self-learning or supplementary material for a specific course.

Open Yale Courses

https://oyc.yale.edu/

Provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.

All lectures are available in video, audio, and text transcript formats. Moreover, often the reading materials, board notes, and assignments are available.

Some of the courses at the University of St Andrews align with courses offered at Yale. For example, EC3302 Decision and Game Theory directly follows Professor Ben Polak’s Econ 159 course. This website, though, has fewer courses available than MIT OpenCourseWare.

Overall, this is a great resource for exploring topics of personal interest such as African American History, Environmental Politics and Law, Capitalism: Success, Crisis, and Reform, and Poetry. The full list of courses can be found here.