Introducing a List of 50 Free Courses Granting Certificates from Great Universities

ORIGINAL: Open Culture

October 15th, 2012

Earlier this year we began telling you about a potential revolution in education — the birth of MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses. As explained above, these courses let students, thousands at a time, take courses from great universities for free online. What’s more, most of these courses offer students a credential — something like a certificate of completion — if they master the material covered in the class. Some of the MOOC providers are well known: 

• Coursera, 
• Udacity, and 
• edX. Others, like
• Class2Go, 
• Google Course Builder and 
• Venture Lab, are just emerging. 

But, together, they’re producing courses at breakneck speed, and we thought it was time to start organizing a list for you.

Today, we’re rolling out a list of 50 Free Courses Granting Certificates from Great Universities. The list organizes courses chronologically by start date, and it indicates the kind of credential the courses offer — for example,

• Certificates of Completion, 
• Statements of Accomplishment, or 
• Certificates of Mastery. 

The list, which happens to include another 25 courses not bearing certificates, will be regularly updated. You can expect it to grow rapidly, and you can always access it by clicking Certificate Courses in the top navigation of our web site. Below we have listed a number of online courses starting this week:

• Finance - Stanford on Venture Lab – October 15 (10 weeks)
• Introduction to Computer Science - Harvard on edX – October 15 (24 weeks)
• Startup Boards: Advanced Entrepreneurship - Stanford on Venture Lab – October 15 (9 weeks)
• Designing a New Learning Environment - Stanford on Venture Lab – October 15 (9 weeks)
• Technology Entrepreneurship - Stanford on Venture Lab – October 15 (9 weeks)
• Experimental Genome Science - Duke on Coursera – October 15 (12 weeks)
• A Crash Course on Creativity - Stanford on Venture Lab - October 17 (10 weeks)

Get the full list here. It includes 75 Massive Open Courses in total.