Have you ever wanted to take a course at MIT? How about at Stanford? Have I got news for you. In recent years, massive open online courses ("MOOCs") have become a trend in online education. The term was coined in 2008 by David Cormier, manager of web communications and innovations at the University of Prince Edward Island.
MOOCs are designed like college courses but are available to anyone anywhere in the world, at no cost. Sadly, you do not receive a college credit, but you will receive a certificate of completion when you complete all coursework. The courses span a myriad of subjects, often are taught by some of the leaders in those fields, and are available in many languages.
Coursera is perhaps the most well-known of the online education facilitators. As of April 2014, Coursera has 7.4 million users in 641 courses from 108 institutions. Coursera offers courses in physics, engineering, humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences, mathematics, business, computer science, and other subjects and are available in 12 different languages. They even has an official mobile app for iPhone and Android.
EdX is a non-profit course site, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is governed by MIT and Harvard. EdX offers MOOCs and interactive online classes in subjects including law, history, science, engineering, business, social sciences, computer science, public health, and artificial intelligence (AI). It has partnerships with institutions in the U.S., Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Japan, China and Korea. It currently has over 2.1 million users in 176 online courses.
MIT has their own open courseware, where most of the materials used in the teaching of almost all of MIT's subjects are available on the Web - free of charge. They have more than 2,000 courses available. Stanford also has their own online and open courses. These sites are both great options if you prefer to work at your own pace, as compared to structured classes like those offered at Coursera and EdX.
European institutions are also getting in on the act. Germany-based Iversity offers courses in both English and German and the first courses went online in October 2013. Future Learn is a subsidiary of the British Open University and has partnerships with universities across Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.
For those looking to learn a language, Duolingo offers completely free language education. As of January 2014, Duolingo has 25 million users, out of which about 12.5 million are active. If you're interested in learning a valuable skill, Codecademy teaches programming and coding with interactive online courses. Other sites, like Open Culture, are not affiliated with institutions. On Open Culture, the editor finds the free courses and audio books on the web and hosts them on the site. The courses are available in audio and video, and can be downloaded straight to a computer or mp3 player. They currently have 950 courses available.
For the geeky and whimsical, there is the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry, in which "a Hogwarts education has now become available online to all aspiring witches and wizards. You are now able to enroll at Hogwarts, collect your textbooks and begin taking our 9-week courses online. You can now progress through all seven years of schooling and be assigned a professor, homework assignments, quizzes and more." All for free...or at least until Universal gets a whiff of the site and closes it down! Better enroll quickly.
This is by no means a complete list of all site and institutions that offer free online courses. MOOC List has many more listed. These MOOCs are a great way to expand your knowledge at a cost that anyone can afford.
No comments:
Post a Comment