The benefit to an online college is that it offers online college courses. But did you know that there are several websites that offer these college courses free?
Skip the driving, tuition, and other fees and take free online college courses. Classes are available in a huge variety of subjects, designed by real professors and other experts, and often offered by prestige universities that would otherwise charge you a fortune.
Below are the best websites to find free online college courses. There are lectures, tutorials, tests, audio, video, and more, all 100 percent freely available from an online college or other educational website. You can even pair these college classes with a free college textbook.
Comprehensive catalog taught by industry-leading academics.
No registration required.
What We Don't Like
Somewhat cumbersome user interface.
Historical only, no interactivity.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology maintains its MIT OpenCourseWare presence on the web. OCW contains information and materials from more than 2400 courses that have been taught at the school. MIT's goal is to publish all its course materials online and make them available to everyone at no charge. More than 300 million visitors have taken advantage of these free courses.
Classes are available on a wide range of topics, including engineering, fine arts, business, mathematics, health and medicine, humanities, and society. The materials may differ from class to class but usually include video lectures, lecture notes, problems, and assignments.
These free classes are historical, meaning you can't interact live with an instructor, receive feedback on assignments, or get answers to questions like you can with a true online college. Still, however, you're receiving the same high-value class information that MIT-enrolled students received.
Free, historical insights into courses offered at JHSPH.
Focus on public health and epidemiology.
What We Don't Like
Lacks interactivity.
Not much use beyond public health.
Some topics contain zero courses.
Johns Hopkins, one of the world's premier medical learning institutions, offers free materials and images from more than 100 courses developed by the faculty at JH. For anyone looking to advance their health care career without sacrificing quality, this is the first place to look.
The college courses that are part of the school's OpenCourseWare program focus on public health, with browsable topics such as health policy, malaria, cancer, aging, refugee health, HIV/AIDS, global health, and genetics.
There are several ways these free college courses are presented, including with audio and case studies, and as core courses for the Hopkins Masters of Public Health.
Since these online college courses are archives, you can't interactive with Johns Hopkins faculty members.
Offers one-off courses, professional and graduate certificates, and graduate degrees.
Based on a modified version of the robust Coursera program.
Taught by skilled instructors on the Stanford faculty.
What We Don't Like
Lots of material blends; difficult to differentiate course types.
Stanford University offers an ongoing selection of free college courses on many topics. Some selections include law, education, biosciences, statistics and data science, human rights, and economics. Courses usually include videos, problem sets, knowledge assessments, and other learning tools.
If you’re looking for a basic introduction to computer science, you’ll want to check out SEE (Stanford Engineering Everywhere), which is ostensibly for students interested in engineering, but there are quite a few free technology-related class offerings there. Most consist of recorded lectures, handouts, assignments, and other resources.
Unlike other open courseware sites, some of the free college classes here are monitored for feedback, and some offer a printable Statement of Accomplishment if you receive a sufficiently high enough score in the class.
Free courses offered by leading universities and corporations.
Rich catalog of content.
MicroMaster's program is an innovation in higher education.
Lots of search filters to refine the results.
What We Don't Like
More advanced program-type offerings (like masters programs) are paid, which is inconsistent with branding.
Robust catalog, but a clear emphasis on STEM fields.
The edX website offers free online college classes from its partners, which include MIT, Harvard, UC Berkeley, Boston University, and a huge list of other colleges and universities.
Over two-dozen subjects are available, so you can pick up free college classes on everything from design and architecture to ethics, language, finance, food and nutrition, medicine, music, physics, electronics, and more.
One of the filtering options let you find online college courses by availability, such as current, starting soon, upcoming, or self-paced. There are also archived college classes to pick from, a school filter, three levels of courses (intro, intermediate, and advanced), and language-specific courses.
Although the classes themselves are free, edX offers an optional certificate for a fee to students who complete certain courses on a higher level. The fee varies from a few dollars to a few hundred.
The iTunes U mobile app for iPhone and iPad is filled with free online courses from universities, colleges, and other sources. Everything on the app is free, some in the form of podcasts with downloadable resource material, and others as slides or videos.
The free college courses catalog is enormous, although you can narrow the options to college-level and topics such as business, communications, engineering, languages, health, and many more.
These free online college courses used to be located in iTunes as iTunes University. However, all the educational content is still available through the iTunes U mobile app.
Coursera is an online collaboration of several of the top-tiered universities in the world, with offerings from a wide variety of programs that range from humanities and biology to computer science.
Classes include recorded online lectures, multimedia, and links to other free resources. Registration is free, and when you complete the class, you're eligible to receive a printable certificate for a small fee.
Online courses include classes from Duke University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Edinburgh, University of Virginia, Vanderbilt, and others.
Not all the classes are free; the degree and certificates paths are all fee-based, but you can audit some of those classes via video lectures and see some course content for free. Free classes mingle with fee-based classes, so you have to do some searching to find just what you want.
The college course directory is a good place to start so that you can explore various topics and skills and find trending courses.
Instructors tend to be industry pros, not necessarily university faculty.
Broad reach of content.
Finding only the free college courses is easy.
What We Don't Like
Content is instructor driven, so there are some odd gaps in the catalog.
Pricing models vary wildly, and pricing for the same course can change.
Udemy differs from some of the other sites in that not all of the classes are free and some of the classes are taught not by professors but by people who have excelled in their particular fields, such as Mark Zuckerberg or Marissa Mayer.
Enter a topic in the search field and then open the filter menu to mark Free so that you're only viewing the free online college courses. You can also filter by topic, feature (quizzes, captions, tests), rating, duration, language, and skill level.
There are plenty of learn-to-code classes here, but there are also course offerings like Digital Marketing Basics and Network Security Essentials.
Focus of some courses is, at times, too technically narrow.
Site strongly encourages signups before revealing important context info.
Udacity offers a limited selection of courses, all computer science-related, with instruction from distinctive leaders in their fields. For example, if you’ve ever wanted to create a search engine in seven weeks and you’d like to learn directly from one of the co-founders of Google, then Udacity is for you.
Classes are organized into three separate tracks: Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced. All classes are taught in a video format with quizzes and homework assignments. Final grades and certificates are awarded to students who finish the coursework successfully.
Some of the free college course topics include UX designer, robotics, Android basics, C++, cloud developer, data streaming, deep learning, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
As you're working your way through the online college courses, your progress and list of classes are stored in your Udacity Classroom.
Students can opt into Udacity’s job program to sign up for free classes, where they can choose to share their resume with the Udacity team and potential employers.
Democratization has its limits; you're at the mercy of your peers.
No certifications offered.
Some links lead to dead websites.
Peer to Peer University (P2PU) is a collaborative experience where you’re meant to learn in community with others. Registration and courses are completely free.
Scroll the selections, view by topic or language, or enter a search term to locate a class. You can also sort the free online college courses by popularity, date added, and rating.
Courses include classes in several programming languages, business topics, music theory, and a wide range of other subjects.
As you complete a college course, you can display badges on your website or social profiles. No certifications are offered here, but the courses are well executed and worth taking a look at.
I've got a list of websites that I have personally found to meet those criteria. Most of them have been around for over a decade (or two), proving their worth by their longevity. Check out my long list of FREE online reference tools, covering more than a dozen areas of expertise.
General Reference Tools
In a library, if you don't know where to look for a reference book, you go to the Reference Librarian. On the Internet, if you don't know where to look for answers, you go to RefDesk.com. At first glance, the sheer amount of useful links on the Refdesk home page can be overwhelming. But it's really quite well organized and useful.
Encyclopedia.com gives you credible answers from published reference works. Enter you search words and it will search 40+ encyclopedias, as well as 70+ dictionaries and thesauruses.
At Dictionary.com, you can look up a word in either a dictionary or Roget's Thesaurus (to find synonyms and antonyms). The site also offers Ask Doctor Dictionary (for questions about words or grammar), the Word of the Day, daily crosswords & word search puzzles, and a huge list of links to other online dictionaries, including hundreds of non-English ones.
At the Infoplease Homework Center, students will find useful information by subject area, develop better writing, note-taking and study skills, and search through previous questions and answers from other students.
WordReference offers free online translation dictionaries. Enter a word and it will first translate it into Spanish, French, Italian, German or Russian, then it will display the dictionary definition for that word in the chosen language.
Need a synonym, antonym, or related word? Try this RhymeZone.
The Farmers' Almanac is filled with entertaining short stories, good cooking, fun, facts, forecasts, timely household tips, calendars for fishing and of course gardening.
The CIA World Factbook, published by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, has data on every country in the world, including maps, background, geography, people, government, economy, and military.
Medical Questions
WebMD is one of the leading medical reference websites. This authoritative website contains thousands of articles on medical conditions, diseases and how to stay healthy.
The Mayo Clinic's Symptom Checker prompts you to choose a symptom, enter related factors, and view possible causes. MedlinePlus is a service of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the world's largest medical library. You'll find information on health, wellness, disorders, prescription drugs, over-the-counter medicines, supplements, and articles about diseases, symptoms, tests, and treatments.
Business and Financial Research
Hoover's Online provides company capsules and profiles that give comprehensive company, industry, and market intelligence to investors and business professionals. (Insert vacuum cleaner joke here.)
EDGAR - The SEC requires public companies to file registration statements, periodic reports, and other forms electronically through EDGAR. Now you can access and download this information for free.
Zack's Investment Research has tools that enable individuals to research, select and track their investments more effectively. Company news, profiles, stock prices and more.
Weather
In addition to local weather maps and forecasts for thousands of cities around the world, The Weather Channel website offers many other useful features such as the free Desktop Weather software for Windows, Inbox Weather (e-mails you the forecast daily) Pollen Reports, Air Quality Forecast, and the Interstate Forecast planner.
For the weather junkies, Weather Underground has everything you'd expect from a weather site, including yesterday's forecast.
Check the BBC Weather Centre for weather forecasts for the UK and cities around the world.
Movies
The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) lets you search for a movie or video by its title, and tells you everything you could ever want to know about that movie and its actors.
Ever wonder if a movie is appropriate for your family? ScreenIt has detailed reviews for movies and videos. You'll know just how much language, violence, sex, and other potentially offensive material you'll be exposed to.
Rotten Tomatoes is a site for both casual movie-goers and film buffs alike. Millions each month use Rotten Tomatoes as a dependable resource and objective coverage of movies and videos. With more than 100,000 titles and 360,000 review links in its ever-gro wing database, Rotten Tomatoes offers a fun and informative way to discover the critical reaction on movies from the nation's top print and online film critics, neatly summarized via the TomatoMeter.
Music and Lyrics Research
Try Lyrics.com if you want a searchable database of song lyrics covering many different genres.
Kiss This Guy is a website devoted to misheard or misunderstood lyrics. Finally, you can find out why Manfred Mann had a boulder on his shoulder in the song "Blinded by the Light."
US Government
Visit Congress.gov and find up-to-date information on who's really saying what on Capitol Hill. This site, formerly known as THOMAS, is a service of the U.S. Congress to make legislative information publicly available. It contains full text of legislation (both House and Senate bills searchable by keyword or by bill number) and full text of the Congressional Record. No spin, bias, or sound bytes here... Just the raw data from which you can draw your own conclusions.
USA.gov is the U.S. government's official web portal, a guide to finding government info and websites on a wide variety of topics, including Benefits and Grants, Consumer Guides, Environment, Energy, and Agriculture, Health and Nutrition, Money and Taxes, Public Safety and Law, Science and Technology, and Voting and Elections.
Language Translation
Google Translate does computer-assisted translations from English to Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian -- and back again, sort of. In addition to entering or pasting your own text, you can select a document to transalte. Supported formats include txt, rtf, doc, pdf, ppt, and xls. Over 100 languages are supported, and it does a pretty good job of figuring out what the input language is, when you're not sure of the starting point. You can click an icon to hear the phrase spoken in the target language,
Microsoft's Bing Translator is a similar service, covering about 60 languages.
Maps, Topography and Astronomy
Google Maps will help you find your way from point A to point B, providing detailed turn-by-turn directions. Google Earth lets you virtually fly to any point on Earth and view streets, houses, buildings, and terrain, from satellite imagery. The built-in Google Sky component lets you zoom out into outer space to view planets, stars, constellations and galaxies.
Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope turns your computer into a telescope. This jaw-droppingly cool tool blends images and data from ground and space-based telescopes to allow for seamless panning and zooming across the night sky. You can also take guided tours, narrated by astronomers, featuring interesting places in the sky.
CitySearch helps you explore city life, from Las Vegas hotels to New York restaurants, Chicago events to Seattle coffee houses. Find recommendations, ratings, reviews, tips and more.
Genealogy
Cyndi's List is a comprehensive index to over 100,000 genealogical resources on the Internet. You'll find a list of links that point you to genealogical research resources in many different countries, all categorized & cross-referenced. It's like a "card catalog" to the genealogical collection in the immense library that is the Internet. Over 1000 new links are added each month!
Snopes - Snopes is one of the best urban legend debunking sites on the Net. Before you forward that crazy story to all your friends, check it out on Snopes.
The Truth or Fiction site also has a wealth of well-researched and common sense information on urban legends.
Air Travel
Are you meeting a friend at the airport? Track a flight, with this graphical real-time monitor that shows the flight path on a map, along with the aircraft's altitude, speed and estimated arrival time. Try the FlightAware Flight Tracker.
BIBLE SEARCH - Bible Gateway is a tool for reading and searching the Bible online, covering over 100 languages and translations. It provides advanced searching capabilities, which allow readers to find and compare passages based on keywords, phrases, or scripture reference.
FINANCIAL AID - FinAid is the most comprehensive collection of information about student financial aid on the web. FinAid is free and has a stellar reputation in the educational community as the best Web site of its kind. Make it your first stop on the Web when looking for ways to finance an education.
HOUSE VALUES - Zillow.com offers free automated house valuations on more than 80 million homes across the United States. You can see the estimated value of your house, your neighbor's house, or just about any other home in the country -- whether it's for sale or not. Zillow pulls information from public real estate records, tax rolls and other sources to compute a house value. Zillow also offers a forum where you can chat with pros, as well as other home buyers and sellers.
PEOPLE FINDERS - Need to find someone's phone number, address, or other personal info? Check out FastPeopleSearch and search my name, phone number, or address. In the past I've recommended WhitePages.com, but I've found this site offers more information, fewer ads, and doesn't constantly try to sell "premium" services.
SPECIALIZED GOOGLE SEARCHES - Just visit Google and type in a phone number, stock symbol, or Fedex tracking number, and see what happens. Learn more about Google's secret search tools in my artcile Here's How to Strengthen Your Google Fu.
Got a favorite online reference, research or search tool? Post a comment below and tell us about it...
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 2 2019 (IPS) - “Without journalists able to do their jobs in safety, we face the prospect of a world of confusion and disinformation”, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has warned in a statement released ahead of the International Day to End Impunity Against Journalists, which falls on 2 November.
“When journalists are targeted, societies as a whole pay a price”, added the UN chief. “Without the ability to protect journalists, our ability to remain informed and contribute to decision-making, is severely hampered”.
Killings and attacks on the rise
A new study from the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, underscores the risks that journalists face, showing that almost 90 per cent of those found responsible for the deaths of more than 1,100 of them, between 2006 and 2018, have not been convicted.
The deadliest countries for journalists, according to the statistics, are Arab States, where almost a third of the killings took place. The Latin American and Caribbean region (26 per cent), and Asian and Pacific States (24 per cent) are the next most dangerous.
The report, “Intensified Attacks, New Defences”, also notes that killings of journalists have risen by some 18 per cent in the past five years (2014-2018), compared to the previous five-year period.
The deadliest countries for journalists, according to the statistics, are Arab States, where almost a third of the killings took place. The Latin American and Caribbean region (26 per cent), and Asian and Pacific States (24 per cent) are the next most dangerous.
Journalists are ofen murdered for their reporting on politics, crime and corruption, and this is reflected in the study, which reveals that, in the past two years (2017-2018), more than half of journalist fatalities were in non-conflict zones.
In his statement, the Secretary-General noted the rise in the scale and number of attacks on journalists and media workers, as well as incidents that make their work much harder, including “threats of prosecution, arrest, imprisonment, denial of journalistic access and failures to investigate and prosecute crimes against them”.
A high-profile example is the murder of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2017. The case is being followed by independent UN human rights expert Agnès Callamard, among others, who has suggested that too little has been done by the Maltese authorities to investigate the killing.
On Friday, as Haiti continued to face a protracted, violent crisis that has led to the deaths of some 42 people, and 86 injured, UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet called on all of those involved in the violence to refrain from targeting journalists, and respect the freedom of the media to do its job: at least one journalist is among those killed, and nine other reporters have been injured, according to Ms. Bachelet’s Office (OHCHR).
Keep Truth Alive
This year UNESCO has launched the #KeepTruthAlive social media campaign, which draws attention to the dangers faced by journalists close to their homes, highlighting the fact that 93% of those killed work locally, and featuring an interactive map created for the campaign, which provides a vivid demonstration of the scale and breadth of the dangers faced by journalists worldwide.
The Day is being commemorated with a flagship event in Mexico City next week on 7 November – an international seminar entitled “Strengthening regional cooperation to end impunity for crimes and attacks against journalists in Latin America” – and events are also taking place in 15 other countries, including an exhibition of press cartoons, under the headline: “Draw so as not to write them off”, at UN HQ in New York, which honours the memories of French journalists Ghislaine Dupont and Claude Verlon, murdered in Mali on 2 November 2013.
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