10 Sites Offering Free Online Education for Students and Aspiring Scholars

When it comes to accreditation, certification and academic standard, you have to consider and filter out which you would go for from the numerous list of online education platforms available today. This article will help you in that regard.

Online learning, as defined by Wikipedia involves courses offered by postsecondary institutions that are 100% virtual, excluding massively open online courses. Online learning, or virtual classes offered over the internet, is contrasted with traditional courses taken in a brick-and-mortar school building.

Below is a list comprising 10 trusted and standard platforms, with a bonus, Future Learn, that offer free education to students and aspiring scholars.

Coursera

Coursera is a world-wide online learning platform founded in 2012 by Stanford University’s computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller that offers massive open online courses, specializations, degrees, professional and master track courses.

edX

edX is a massive open online course provider created by Harvard and MIT. It hosts online university-level courses in a wide range of disciplines to a worldwide student body, including some courses at no charge. It also conducts research into learning based on how people use its platform.

Future Learn

Future Learn is an educational platform dedicated to making online learning enjoyable for learners and partners alike. They help learners find the right course to boost their career prospects, improve their English, or start a new hobby.

Khan Academy

Khan Academy is an American non-profit educational organization created in 2008 by Salman Khan, with the goal of creating a set of online tools that help educate students. The organization produces short lessons in the form of videos.

Udemy

Udemy, founded in May 2010, is an online learning platform aimed at professional adults and students. As of Jan 2020, the platform has more than 50 million students and 57,000 instructors teaching courses in over 65 languages. There have been over 295 million course enrollments.

iTunesU Free Courses

iTunes U is a digital supermarket for free courses, plus some paid content such as ebooks and apps. You can subscribe to a course in iTunes U to download all its content, or get new lessons as they become available.

MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT OpenCourseWare is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to publish all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, freely and openly available to anyone, anywhere.

Stanford Online

Stanford Online is an educational initiative launched by Stanford University which offers a variety of professional education opportunities.

Codecademy

Codecademy is an online interactive platform that offers free coding classes in 12 different programming languages including Python, Java, Go, JavaScript, Ruby, SQL, C++, Swift, and Sass, as well as markup languages HTML and CSS.

NPTEL

National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) is a project of MHRD initiated by seven Indian Institutes of Technology (Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras, Guwahati and Roorkee) along with the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 2003, to provide quality education to anyone interested in learning.

ict iitk

Electronics & ICT Academy (E & ICT Academy) at IIT Kanpur has been mandated to provide industry focused and industry-driven, hands-on courses in Electronics & ICT. It strives to narrow the gap between the academic approach to Electronics & ICT domains as currently provided by the educational institutions and the practically oriented approach as demanded by the industry. It is working towards enhancing the domain expertise of interested faculties with a special focus on the faculties of the three northern states of U.P., Haryana, Punjab and the two union territories of Delhi and Chandigarh, through a continuous engagement model with courses upgraded regularly.