How To Take Courses From Elite Universities Around the World For Free

Life is a continuous journey of learning and doing new things. Wouldn’t it be great to tap into the great minds from the top universities around the world right at your computer (or mobile devices)? With the recent development of online education movement, it is not a dream anymore. The best of all, it can be free!!

With the recent development of the so called MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), you can learn pretty much the same as you will do in the university. You can access the course material, watch the video, discuss with your fellow student through online forum, attend the office hour from the TA or professor, do the homework, take the exam — ALL ONLINE. If you finish all the course requirement on time, you can also get an online certificate showing that you have done the course (if you care to).

Here are some of the popular MOOC websites:

1. Coursera: it is mostly university courses from Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, Yale, Princeton, EPFL, etc. I am actually actively taking courses from coursera since last year and loving it.
2. edX: it is mostly for university courses as well, started with Harvard and MIT. Now covers the Princeton, Cornell, Kyoto University, Tsinghua University, Peking University, etc. Personally I don’t see much difference between edX and Coursera other than the east coast vs west coast rival :-).
3. Udacity: it has some university courses as well as training courses offered by companies such as Google, Nvidia, Cadence, etc. So we might find some interesting topic from career training perspective.

And trust me, these MOOC courses are really massive. Some of the popular courses have hundreds of thousands student enrolled.

Besides these websites, you can also find the “previous generation” online course from the individual universities:

1. Harvard Open Courses 
2. MIT Open Courseware (OCW)
3. Stanford Engineering Everywhere 
4. Berkeley Webcast
5. Open Yale Courses
6. UCLA Extension Free Courses
7. Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative

Let us know what is your experience with the online courses and which is your favorite?