Pennington Public Library Issues List Of Free Online College Courses

Press release from the Pennington Public Library:

April 5, 2020

Discover thousands of online courses from top universities like MIT, Stanford, and Harvard. There are an estimated 800 institutions offering more than 10,000 online courses, many of which are free and self-paced, allowing you to take them at your convenience. While similar to university courses, these do not tend to offer academic credit.

Class Central: Class central was set up in 2011 when universities first began making courses available online for free. It aggregates over 10,000 courses from many providers, focusing primarily on free (or free to audit) courses from universities. It includes the ability to review courses you’ve taken (and read other people’s reviews); follow universities, subjects, and courses to receive personalized updates; and also plan and track your learning.

Coursera: Coursera works mainly with universities and college, but also with some corporations and governments to provide over 1,800 free courses. Like Class Central, it also includes a rating system. As well as the ability to search by difficulty level, skills learned, and relevance to particular jobs.

MOOC List: MOOC List is an aggregator (directory) of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Free Online Courses from different providers. These providers include Coursera, edX and FutureLearn. You can search by multiple criteria: Providers and Categories, University/Entity, Instructor, Country, Language, Type of Certificate and Tag.

You can find some examples of courses below:

Coursera:

Learning How to Learn from UCSD

Science Matters: Let’s Talk About COVID-19 from the Imperial College London

Financial Engineering and Risk Management from Columbia University

Seeing Through Photographs from the Museum of Modern Art

Learn to Program: The Fundamentals from the University of Toronto

Introduction to Philosophy from the University of Edinburgh

Buddhism and Modern Psychology from Princeton University

Class Central:

Modern and Contemporary American Poetry from the University of Pennsylvania

Extinctions: Past and Present from the University of Cape Town

Introduction to Dutch from the University of Groningen

The Science of the Solar System from the California Institute of Technology

The Bible’s Prehistory, Purpose, and Political Future from Emory University

The Musculoskeletal System: The Science of Staying Active into Old Age from Newcastle University , The University of Sheffield, and the University of Liverpool

Constitutional Interpretation from Princeton University

This press release was produced by the Pennington Public Library. The views expressed here are the author’s own.