This article was last updated on April 18, 2022
Nowadays, getting educated online is becoming a trend. People who are already working or students who have financial constraints, including anyone who cannot leave their home to study at a college tend to look for such options of availing free of cost education in the comforts of their home. A lot of places offer education to everyone for free now, and here are the best ones.
20 Amazing Websites For Free Online Education
1. Coursera
If you also want to take the courses of a prestigious college, Coursera would be your knight in shining armor, as there are around 400 courses that are offered here, all under one roof! Whether you want to study law or music, you will get it all here. The courses are monitored by a professor therefore they comprise of videos and online quizzes, to be completed within the allotted duration. The courses keep on rotating so it is advised to keep a watch every now and then.
2. Udacity
This easy to navigate website can be browsed for free video courses in the subjects of psychology, physics, math, business as well as computer science. A little icon is placed next to each video for the learner to know which course is of an advanced nature and which to start with.
3. YouTube
YouTube has more than 6,000 channels that are specifically for the science and education sector, along with other channels reserved for cooking and even DIY’s. You can access it for free and see any video that you find to be worth your interest.
4. Wikiversity
The students from preschool to college and other levels can get information on this text-based website. This website is a branch of Wikimedia Foundation, and consists of details on a diverse range of courses. It is an open source project, where one can get valuable information as per their needs.
5. Khan Academy
If you are looking for a great place to learn, Khan Academy can be a safe bet. It houses more than 3k videos on a diverse range of topics from different subjects. As complicated courses are divided into different videos and text sections, one can learn them at their own pace. One can also inquire or give their feedback on a topic, if they feel like.
6. Google and others
In order to find information on a particular topic, Google and other search engines offer a great layout of courses on your browser search results. You can gather as many information as you want by searching and clicking through the pages that these search engines present to you.
7. Alison
This is another resource which offers courses in English, German and French and covers all the courses related to health, safety measure, SAT preparation, which is required in Ireland. From law to fundraising, it covers a myriad of lessons that one may need to acquaint themselves with. At the end of a course, the person being enrolled gets a certification for having successfully completed the course.
8. MIT Open Courseware
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a big name, and you can certainly enroll yourself in one of its courses for free in the comfort of your home and study at your own pace. The website offers the materials related to all the courses which can be also searched for department wise. When you choose a course from the courses offered, you will be briefed on when the course was originally taught and who conducted the classes. You will also have an access to the course calendar, study resources as well as the assignments and syllabus of the course. All you need to do it download the resources and study as and when you find convenient.
9. Open Education Consortium
This makes all the course material of college or university level accessible for everyone on the internet free of cost. One can easily look for a particular topic that is of any interest to them here and they can even search for a course by language or its source as well. It offers many subjects from the worldwide universities, with around 5,000 classes being in English alone.
10. Open Learning Institute
This resource is offered by the Carnegie Mellon University and gives an access to the similar assessments as well as self-guided assignments as are provided in a traditional class. The coursework provided is quite detailed, however, the options of courses available are just a handful. It also makes certain courses available online for free that are led by proper instructors.
11. Open Culture
Its website is not something worth looking at, but provides more than 700 courses of the level of K-12, college, certification based or language lessons that can be downloaded easily. It also offers certain links related to the reading list as recommended by Ernest Hemingway, which might be interesting to look at and learn from, other than the courses.
12. Academic Earth
The ultimate place to look for courses for more than 50 universities all across the world, Academic Earth makes it possible to search for the courses by the general subject or source. You can easily browse through the well-organized playlists on a variety of subjects and choose the one that you find worth knowing about.
13. Open Education Database
This database offers more than 10,000 courses from the universities all over the world. All that you need to do is search for a topic and you will be provided with the complete list of courses, telling you the ones that have mixed media, video or even audio lessons, so that you may learn from any resource as per your personal preference. If you are willing to have a proper education, you may also check out this website to know of the different online and traditional schools of repute.
14. TED
This legendary source of information covers all kinds of topics, with thousands of videos that are easily available to be accessed on the website. You can also search among the other tags on the website to make it suggest any informative or fascinating video, which can be of a motivational nature.
15. iTunes U
This is not just another app that you can download on your iPhone or iPad, but it offers resources from the elementary school to college level for up to 500,000 courses. The educational resources are also available from many reputed institutes. One can easily add the notes to their videos or share them with friends, along with keeping the course material in the iBooks, which can be easily made use of wherever you need.
16. 99U
99U also offers educational videos on a diverse range of topics. The website can be much beneficial to you if you are into a creative line of work or aspiring to be an entrepreneur as it focuses mainly on the innovative as well as the creative side of things along with the videos on business development.
17. edX
Another great option for free online education is edX. Also bringing together courses from many different schools, the site has impressive, quality information for everyone. edX covers a great range of topics.
18. Project Gutenberg
Whether you need an eBook on history or the latest technology, you can access more than 4,200 eBooks here for free. You can easily download all the eBooks to your eReader or computer.
19. Bartleby
This resource has a huge collection of fiction to non-fiction as well as poetry and other reference work. You can easily find many classics or even quotes on a particular subject here.
20. The Free Library
One can browse around 21 million free books, articles and journals as late as 1984 till the present, by entering keywords or the topic and author. You can also collect the information from here to be included in your research paper.
Final thoughts..
You don’t have to go to libraries to get your information nowadays, all you need is a device that is connected to the internet.
Featured image photo source: Official GDC