In 2007 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) was first time created at Utah State University. MOOCs are like college courses but are available to anyone anywhere for free. There will not be a college credit but a certificate of completion after the whole coursework is completed. The courses, that are taught by some of the top professors in those fields, cover different subjects and are in different languages.

An educated population is better than an ignorant one. Even if no official credit is earned for these courses, it’s wonderful that they’re available. Knowledge itself is a reward.

Best schools, best courses!

Coursera is one of the most well-known of the free online education facilitator. They have courses in many languages (english, chinese, french, spanish, russian, portuguese, turkish, ukrainian, german, hebrew, arabic, greek, italian and japanese), and have 17,000,000 enrollments form students from 190 countries. Coursera has over 600 courses in almost 30 categories.

EdX is a further non-profit online education facilitator created by founding partners MIT and Harvard and is based in Camridge, Massachusetts. Topics include biology, business, chemistry, computer science, economics, finance, electronics, engineering, food and nutrition, history, humanities, law, literature, math, medicine, music, philosophy, physics, science, statistics and more.

Also MIT has its own open coursware! MIT OpenCourseWare makes the materials used in the teaching of almost all of MIT’s subjects available on the Web, free of charge. With more than 2,200 courses available, OCW is delivering on the promise of open sharing of knowledge.

In Europe we have the Germany-based Iversity that offers free courses in both English and German. Here is an overview on how it works!

If you are particularly interested about languages you can have give a look to Duolingo. There you will find courses in many languages totally free, with no ads and no gimmiks.

Codecademy offers free programming and coding interactive lessons. There you can learn how to code Javascript, HTML/CSS, PHP, Python, Ruby and API. I am now following few courses at Codecademy and I am really impressed about how much I learned in so little amount of time.

More interesting courses can be found at www.mooc-list.com

Mooc-list.com

This Wikipedia page has a fascinating list of educational video websites.

Did you get excited about the idea? Do you know of other universities sharing for free their knowledge? Please comment and share.

Thanks guys!