You can use these free online learning platforms to learn, achieve your academic goals and land your dream job. Best of all, many high-quality sites are completely free. You need to be a continuous learner if you want to get ahead in life. As the saying goes, if you aren’t moving forward, you are falling behind. The world never ceases from moving forward. The only way to keep up is by learning something new every day. From history to coding, excellent, free online education awaits on these free educational websites.
29 Online Learning Platforms That Make Learning Easier
Here are the best online learning platforms:
1. Coursera
Coursera is a website that partners with universities and organizations around the world. This brings a wide variety of topics and perspectives to one searchable database. Coursera is a powerful tool for free online education and includes courses from many top universities, museums and trusts. This gives the site an extremely wide range of in-depth courses. Coursera is extremely useful if you’re looking to study many different topics, or want courses from different schools and groups. However, the free courses are now quite limited, so you’ll have to
2. Khan Academy
Partnering with many post secondary schools, Khan Academy offers a useable, well-organized interface. Also curating many courses from around the web, Khan Academy offers impressive depth on many different subjects. Among the more well-known educational sites, Khan Academy is also incredibly user-friendly, which may make it easier to keep learning goals. If you’re looking for a free online education, you can’t go wrong with Khan Academy.
3. Open Culture Online Courses
If you are struggling to find exactly the material you are looking for, try Open Culture’s listing of free online education courses. The page highlights 1000 lectures, videos, and podcasts from universities around the world. The site features a lot of material found only on universities’ private sites, all in easy-to-browse categories. This means you can find hundreds of university courses without having to visit and search each university’s site. Open Culture’s list features courses from England, Australia, Wales, and many state universities around the United States. It’s a very helpful resource for finding many courses in one area of study.
4. Udemy
Udemy’s free courses are similar in concept to Coursera’s but additionally allows users to build custom courses from lessons. Working with many top professors and schools, the site mixes the customizable platform of other sites with a heavy emphasis on top-quality content. This is another site, however, that mixes free and paid content.
5. Lifehack Academy
Lifehack believes in skills that multiply your time, energy, and overall quality of life. In this rapidly changing world, traditional education skills just don’t cut it anymore. You can’t afford to take years learning a skill you’ll never really practice. Lifehack’s courses will help you become a better self by trianing you the cross-functional skills that work across many aspects of life.
6. Academic Earth
Another site with courses from many different schools is Academic Earth. Much like the three sites above, Academic Earth brings together top notch courses from many different sources and focuses on offering a wide variety of subjects. Academic Earth lists courses by subject and school, so it might be easier to find what you’re looking for.
7. 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 from universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Berkeley, meaning a high-quality, free online education is entirely possible here.
8. Alison
Unlike the previous sites on this list, Alison is a free education site offering certification in some areas. Alison offers courses mainly in business, technology, and health, but also includes language learning courses. It’s a great option if users need a professional certificate for their learning, as Alison also offers school curriculum courses.
9. iTunesU Free Courses
A very convenient place for free online education is iTunesU, because it integrates seamlessly with your iPod or any app-ready Apple mobile device. On an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, users download the iTunesU app. Desktop users can access iTunesU on the upper right-hand corner of the iTunes Store. iTunesU is also convenient because the store is categorized much like iTunes. Users can search learning materials in many different ways, including by genre and topic. However, courses are often a mix of free podcasts or videos and paid content. iTunesU does include courses on a variety of topics, but it does not integrate with Android, Google or Windows mobile devices.
10. Stanford Online
Your hub for all the online offerings from Stanford University, Stanford Online offers self-paced and session-based courses. While Coursera features some courses from Stanford, many classes are only available via other hosts. Some courses require iTunes, but most are completed in your web browser. Stanford Online is a great site for high-quality courses, though the topics are somewhat limited compared to sites partnered with more than one school. If you’re looking for free courses, make sure to mark the “free” option on the left-hand side.
11. Open Yale Courses
Open Yale Courses echoes Stanford Online, in that it offers only courses from Yale. While the site is similarly limited to topics taught at the school, Open Yale Courses offers a lot of videos of actual campus lectures. The availability of videos makes the site a great option if you’re looking for quality courses but learn better by watching than by reading.
12. UC Berkeley Class Central
Much like the other schools on this list, UC Berkeley has a variety of free online education options. The school has slightly fewer courses than the schools above, but it includes some supplementary lectures, webcasts, and RSS Feeds, making it easy to keep up with the topics you choose.
13. MIT OpenCourseWare
Similarly, MIT offers a variety of free courses. The school has a comparable number of courses to the schools above, and it includes very in-depth course materials on the subjects available. MIT also offers free RSS feeds, a convenient way to continue learning.
14. Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative
Carnegie Mellon’s free online education site is comparable with the other school’s on this list. However, Open Learning Initiative also covers a smaller range of topics, but for the topics that are covered, impressive, in-depth material is available.
15. Codecademy
Codecademy is a website dedicated specifically to teaching coding. Where other coding sites follow an example/practice session workflow, Codecademy includes a live practice window. This means you can practice coding while still viewing the lesson material. The courses at Codecademy are well-written and easy to follow, and the website is organized very nicely. Codecademy features a centralized dashboard where you can monitor your progress, and it organizes lessons into complete modules. This lets you learn an entire language without needing to pick the next course manually.
16. Code
Code is another website focused on coding and app writing. A site with high-quality courses, Code also features learning options for kids. In addition to kid-friendly courses, Code offers free online education classes on a wide variety of technology topics. These classes include app writing, robotics, and Javascript. Most of the courses are also geared in a such a way that they can be useful in a classroom setting. This makes Code a great resource for harder to find coding topics, as well as various learning settings.
17. University of Oxford Podcasts
The University of Oxford features many different podcasts. Most are public lecture series or lectures from visiting professors, with several different recordings available. The advantage to this particular site is that podcasts are organized into series, making it easy to subscribe to multiple lectures on one topic. This is another great site for thoroughly in-depth lectures.
18. BBC Podcasts
For the more casual learner, the BBC offers a wide variety of podcasts on many different topics. Most podcasts are updated weekly and focus on everything from finance, to sports, to current events. Through the World Service line of podcasts, there are also many in different languages. The focus of these podcasts are less in-depth and theory-based, which may be more accessible to the average person.
19. TED-Ed
Another great destination for more general learning and free online education is TED-Ed. From the same people that brought you the all-encompassing, motivational web series comes a site chocked full of educational videos. Most include impressive animation, and all are ten minutes long or less. Not only is TED-Ed an excellent site for the curious, but it also includes supplemental materials and quizzes on the videos. This makes the site extremely useful in formal education settings, as well as in entertaining ways to brush up on new discoveries and topics.
20. LessonPaths
LessonPaths is another great tool for those looking for a more usable and convenient way to access learning material. On this site, users create link playlists of their favorite learning materials from other sites. Users then rank these collections, making it easy to find many different high-quality, accessible sources on a given topic.
21. Memrise
Another impressive free online education site offering ease of use and convenience is Memrise. Available both on desktop and as an app, Memrise is a particularly powerful tool if you are studying a language. The site encompasses many other topics as well, though some of the course material is user-generated content. Part of what makes Memrise special is their integration of games into the learning materials, mixing learning with entertainment.
22. National Geographic Kids
The kids site for National Geographic is another site that makes free online education applicable for younger users. For those looking for kid-friendly education, a large variety of games, puzzles, videos and photos keep kids interested on this site. National Geographic Kids doesn’t organize learning into courses, making materials available by topic and medium instead. This makes National Geographic Kids a good option for those looking for a more casual learning environment.
23. Fun Brain
Fun Brain is another great option for kids looking for free online education, as it focuses on games and fun puzzles. Particularly focused on math and reading, Fun Brain’s game-based approach can be valuable if the child in question struggles to pay attention. Fun Brain offers rewards and challenges as well, and it is another site aimed at a casual learning experience for kids K-8.
24. OpenCourseWare
OpenCourseWare is a free online education platform that makes it possible for college and university students to access learning materials for free on the web. You can either search for a particular topic, language or source of the learning materials that you want to use. The platform offers learning materials in more than twenty languages. At the moment, there are more than five thousand classes that cover everything from Epidemics to statistical thermodynamics.
25. Open Learning Institute
This is a popular platform from Carnegie Mellon University that allows you to access a wide range of course materials for you to learn at your preferred pace using the materials and assessments that you’d use in class. They have limited offerings. However, a lot of detail has gone into the coursework. You’ll find instructor led courses on the platform.
26. Open Education Database
Open Education Database is one of the free online education sites that’s easy to navigate. It has more than 10000 courses from different universities across the world. When you search by topic, you’ll get to see the number of courses that are available. The courses have video, audio and mixed media lessons to help you learn anything you like. You can use this website to learn more about offline and online schools if you decide to continue with your education formally.
27. Udacity
Udacity is one of the best online learning platforms in the world today. Most of the online courses that you’d like to take can be accessed using an iPhone, iPad or Android. It is a free app that has more than 500000 courses which range from elementary school to the university level. You can find education materials from reputable institutions such as the New York Public Library. As you study, you can add notes to your materials, share them with friends and save your work.
28. Skillshare
If you enjoy learning, you should check out Skillshare. It is an online learning platform that connects you with different experts and professionals, depending on your learning needs.
29. YouTube
Today, anything that you’d like to learn is available on YouTube. It is a free platform that allows you to browse channels and find topics that are of interest to you. In the education and science section, there are more than six thousand channels. In DIY, there are nearly 2000. This is one of the best free online learning platforms to use especially if you are on a budget.
The Bottom Line
With so many amazing free online education resources, everyone has the ability to boost their skills and knowledge. Whether you’re interested in picking up some interesting trivia for your next party, improve your resume with some coding or business skills, or to educate yourself online and become a more well-rounded person, these resources are perfect for you. Featured photo credit: Dai KE via unsplash.com
