
Free Online Courses from Top Universities - happy-go-lucky
http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses
======
kick
[https://edx.org](https://edx.org)

[https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm](https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm)

[https://oli.cmu.edu/](https://oli.cmu.edu/)

[https://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-
initiative](https://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative)

[https://online.stanford.edu/courses](https://online.stanford.edu/courses)
(This one is kind of but not entirely just an edX front-end now.)

Berkeley used to have a treasure trove of free lectures, but then they got
sued because they didn't have subtitles, and so took them down. lbry archived
most of them:

[https://lbry.com/news/20000-illegal-college-lectures-
rescued](https://lbry.com/news/20000-illegal-college-lectures-rescued)

[https://oyc.yale.edu/](https://oyc.yale.edu/)

[https://www.online.caltech.edu/](https://www.online.caltech.edu/)

[https://ocw.jhsph.edu/](https://ocw.jhsph.edu/)

~~~
omarhaneef
You missed Coursera and Udacity

I know there are dozens more but I think of Coursera - Udacity - EdX as the
big 3.

~~~
FabHK
Does Udacity even have free courses anymore? When looking at the website, I
see only nano degrees for which one has to pay. If they still offer the free
courses, they've buried them quite effectively under all their non-free stuff.

(Also, I thought the quality of the Udacity courses was mixed - there was one
on robotics that had quite nice content, but horrible Python implementations
one had to work with.)

~~~
omarhaneef
yes they do, and you can filter by the free courses in their engine:

[https://www.udacity.com/courses/all](https://www.udacity.com/courses/all)

------
mathnmusic
We recently imported around 10,000 free MOOCs and categorized them with topics
at [https://learnawesome.org/](https://learnawesome.org/)

~~~
mkl
Looks interesting. You may want to make the "Browse by Topic" view the
default, instead of the blank grey screen.

I found a dead course link:
[https://learnawesome.org/items/e03a9b40-d16c-424b-98a0-55c7b...](https://learnawesome.org/items/e03a9b40-d16c-424b-98a0-55c7bc177b5b-numerical-
methods-finite-difference-approach)

And a course duplicated 3 times on
[https://learnawesome.org/topics/8ae28f64-31d9-448f-9d94-b9d0...](https://learnawesome.org/topics/8ae28f64-31d9-448f-9d94-b9d028000898-numerical-
computing): Computers, Waves, Simulations: A Practical Introduction to
Numerical Methods using Python

~~~
mathnmusic
Thank you. Fixed all of this. We do have an open issue for this:
[https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn/issues/118](https://github.com/learn-
awesome/learn/issues/118)

Hopefully, some fellow HNers might find this an interesting project to hack on
and make it better. :-)

------
ivan_ah
Wow that's a nice list! It would be even nicer to have some clear indicator
for each course whether it is free as in beer, or free as in freedom (openly
licensed and downloadable).

For example all the iTunes audio courses say "This course material is only
available in the iTunes U app on iPhone or iPad" so limited as to whom can
access.

~~~
pmoriarty
That some of these courses are only available over iTunes really makes me
wonder what the institutions that make this content available only over iTunes
are thinking.

Surely they realize that not everyone uses iTunes, and putting the content in
a walled garden would not make it as available as putting it in a
downloadable, open format on archive.org? Or do they just not care?

~~~
sigjuice
You are absolutely right. There is far more content on YouTube that should
really go on archive.org.

Here is an unfortunate example from not too long ago.
[http://aduni.org/courses/sicp/index.php?view=cw](http://aduni.org/courses/sicp/index.php?view=cw)

I don't think these videos can be played any more.

~~~
mkl
Well the video plays for me with SMPlayer, but not the audio. Some .rm files
play audio fine. The video quality of these is pretty low though, so hopefully
they have a higher resolution master to work from.

------
rakkhi
Tell me uni won’t be different in 20 years. Why would we push our kids to
maximise test scores to get a high score on their last year of secondary
school (like internet points) instead of teaching them to learn anything? Food
for thought and something I have been struggling with lately

~~~
inovica
I fully agree and something that I have been internally debating for around a
year now. My son will (potentially) be going to University in two years, but I
have heard, from friends, that the amount of contact hours is dramatically
reducing. One friend has a son on a 'foundation' course and he has 4 hours of
teaching a week. Another, doing a full-time business degree has 9 hours. My
own opinion is that with the advances in technology, the old educational
system is outmoded; that of learning from a person at the front and then
regurgitating what they have told you in order to prove you know it. That,
coupled with nearly 50% of school leavers going to university now in the UK,
makes me feel that the quality is being eroded.

Unfortunately, my concern is that if my son doesn't follow the status quo then
that will leave him at a disadvantage in the job market. As an employer myself
though, I interview a huge number of people who have degrees and who aren't
really that capable, so it is very difficult to determine quality.

~~~
christudor
"The old educational system is outmoded; that of learning from a person at the
front and then regurgitating what they have told you in order to prove you
know it."

I think most university tutors would find this an insulting caricature of what
they and their students do. Is this what you actually think happens at
university?

~~~
randcraw
I've attended seven colleges/universities over 40 years, big and small, public
and private, in-person and online.

In all in-person large schools, lecture to passive students runs 90% of
classes. The essential problem is, any class with more than about 30 students
is too big to enable interaction from students. That means only maybe 10% of
senior / grad classes even _might_ break the mold of "shut up and sit there
while I talk".

In-person small colleges have it better. Few courses there exceed 50 students.
But more and more courses there are taught by journeyman profs, which causes
instructional quality to vary from year to year.

However MOOCs aren't necessarily any better. Due to their remote delivery and
being recorded, _all_ human contact is lost aside from a few text messages to
TAs (if you pay). In many, even grading is often automated.

In short, I agree with the sentiment that post-secondary education MUST
change. But as they stand now, MOOCs are not the answer. (Other than
significantly reducing tuition, which is no small achievement of course.)

------
tnikolov
Great list, well done! I can recommend Andrew Ng for everything on AI subject
related. His video "Artificial Intelligence - Machine Learning" is nice
introduction to Machine Learning.

------
pietrovismara
edx.org is just awesome. When I decided to learn programming I found on it the
CS50X course from Harvard, which gave me (4 years ago) a great foundation
which then allowed me shortly after to land my first job as dev. I will be
always grateful for the quality free content they put online.

------
jfengel
I was excited to see a class on "Ancient and Medieval Philosophy", though i
see it's just an archive of the course material -- lectures and readings.

Lectures and readings are great, but it's a far cry from learning what the
material really means without the discussion section. MOOCs are good for
learning facts-and-figures type things, and it's an OK way to learn the tools
of the trade (including the trade of programming). But the thing that makes a
top university really "top" is the interaction, challenging your thinking and
learning to read and understand closely, not just study a craft.

I'm very excited by what they're doing at Signum University[1], which is
working on college-level classes without the overhead of a campus. It's not
free; you can't really teach an in-depth education for free. But the direction
it's going, you'll be able to get all the things that we prize about a four-
year college (the things that many employers consider more valuable than
somebody who studied at a place like Devry).

[1] [https://signumuniversity.org/](https://signumuniversity.org/)

------
Dowwie
Is there a date of publication for this post and updates? This list may seem
comprehensive to an outsider but it could be a drop in the bucket since the
list was last updated-- possibly years ago.

I recommend checking out class-central.com, one of the first MOOC aggregators,
for an updated collection.

------
Merrill
Is there some organization that fact checks these online courses, so that we
can know which contain actually valid, true information and which are just
some professor's opinion on the subject?

~~~
jimhefferon
> just some professor's opinion

A professor who is, say, in an economics department is a person whose opinions
on economics have some value. Of course people build up different reputations
over time so YMMV, but I'm personally interested in reflecting on what
Schiller has to say about the subject.

~~~
Merrill
"If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion."

George Bernard Shaw

Shiller is well known, but many of the courses in economics are by professors
that are not well known from lesser universities.

------
aketchum
The majority of classes for Georgia Tech's computer science Masters degree are
available online for free on Udacity. I highly recommend the ML and RL
courses, as well as the CV course.

~~~
_wldu
+1

It's the top 7th ranked CS program in the world too.

------
el_benhameen
Anyone have a favorite data structures and algorithms course?

~~~
spsphulse
I'm new to data structures and algorithms. Saw this fairly new course from
UCSD+HSE mentioned in one of the comments here. I'm finding it pretty
interesting.

[https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-structures-
alg...](https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-structures-algorithms)

------
BostonFern
There's also Academic Earth.

