The 5 Best Free Online Course Providers in 2014

As the annual tuition at many top U.S. colleges and universities pushes beyond $40,000, millions of online learners from around the globe are tuning into free online courses, many of which are offered by the very same institutions that charge students thousands of dollars a month to learn on-site. Massive open online courses or MOOCs give anyone with internet access and a bit of curiosity the opportunity to learn from top schools, professors and industry experts in a wide range of fields, from literature to astrophysics.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology became pioneer in the online learning space, when it made materials from dozens of its courses available to the public on the Internet in September of 2002. For most of the following decade, MIT’s OpenCourseWare remained the only place to go for free, high-quality courseware, but 2012 marked the start of a new revolution in the online learning space. In the span of four months, three major web learning platforms—Udacity, Coursera and edX—launched, boasting courses offered by a veritable who’s who of world-class institutions, such as Stanford, Princeton, Harvard and MIT. Like all new websites, these platforms were a bit rough around the edges at first and early adopters were as much guinea pigs for the course creators as they were students. Now, after two years of squashing bugs and refining content, the web’s best online learning providers offer a more compelling educational experience than ever before.

The following rankings are based the sum total of ratings of 5 key factors that make for a successful MOOC provider: website user experience, quality of instruction and course materials, amount and depth of content, community interaction and special features, such as certificates and career services. I rate each of these factors on a scale of 1 to 5, based on my personal experiences completing over 30 MOOCs over the past three years. So without further ado, the rankings:

#1

                 


Coursera is the largest of the new wave MOOC providers, boasting almost 6 million users as of the end of 2013. While millions of people have been wrong in the past, the Internet got this one right: Coursera offers the best overall experience for free online education on the web in 2014.

The foundation of Coursera’s success is its large network of university partners. The site was the brainchild of professors at Stanford University who partnered with Princeton, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania. Since 2012, Coursera’s portfolio of partners has burgeoned to over 100 of the world’s top educational institutions, including Yale University, Brown University and Rice University. Another key factor in Coursera’s appeal is a broad range of courses that offer something for everyone. My mom can relax with a course on the music of the Beatles, while I get my hands dirty with discrete optimization.

Coursera classes are essentially normal university courses optimized for the web audience. They typically consist of one to three hours of lecture videos per week with periodic in-lecture quizzes. Grading is usually based, in part, on weekly quizzes and many courses also have midterm and final exams. Other assignments vary significantly from course to course. Technical courses often may involve programming assignments and code submissions or downloading and running grading scripts, while courses in the humanities often require students to write essays and review the essays of peers as a part of the grade. The difficulty of assignments and strictness of grading varies a lot. For instance, some courses let you have an unlimited number of attempts on quizzes, while others only give you one shot.

The Coursera website itself is easy to navigate and responsive. The course search tools make it easy to find classes that just launched or that are coming out soon and the personal dashboard is divided into current, past and upcoming courses, which helps keep your mind and materials organized. The content sections within each course vary and can feel a bit jumbled until you get used to a new course. Thankfully, each course has the same basic layout with links to courseware on the left, announcements in the middle and a list of deadlines, new content and new forum posts on the right.

Each course has its own forum, which can be an invaluable resource for students to get help with tough material, iron out confusion about quiz questions and troubleshoot issues with the website. Coursera classes generally have fixed start and end dates, so you can’t always take courses offered in the past after they have ended and you’ll likely not be able to achieve a passing grade if you come into a course more than a few weeks late. While this limits access to content, it also means that class forums tend to be very active when courses are in session, so you can expect to get feedback and help from classmates promptly.

Coursera offers free statements of accomplishment at the discretion of partner institutions. Free certificates are based on an honor code, so it’s on your honor not to cheat: Coursera doesn’t do anything to ensure that you aren’t cheating or to verify that it’s actually you completing the. Criteria for free earning certificates are up to the instructors to set, but in most cases you’ll have to get a grade of 60 to 80 percent. Certain Coursera courses also offer a “Signature Track” where you pay $25 to $90 to earn a verified certificate that connects your coursework to your identity. In theory, this extra level of verification should give certificates more weight as credentials and resume builders, but it remains to be seen whether this is actually the case. Paid certificates are a new concept that the top MOOC providers have only just started rolling out in earnest starting in 2014. Paid certificates may raise some concerns that certain courses or course content will eventually require a fee. Coursera’s FAQ states that you can always take any course on the platform for free and participate as a full student with access to all the course resources even if there is a paid certificate option.

Bottom line: Coursera is well-made website with vibrant forums that offers something for everyone.

Coursera Pros and Cons:

Pros	Cons
Brand new courses starting every month.	Some courses are not always available.
Instructors are professors.	Course prerequisites often understated.
Active forums.	Lecture videos tend to be long.
Courses in a wide variety of subject areas.	Courses tend underuse interactive elements.
Website is laid out well and responsive.

Coursera Ratings (1=poor, 2=fair, 3=good, 4=very good, 5= excellent):

Website User Experience	Quality of Instruction	Amount and Depth of Content	Community Interaction and Support	Certificates, Career Services and Other Features	Total Score
4	4	5	4	4	21

#2

edX is a non-profit MOOC platform spearheaded by MIT and Harvard University that feels a lot like Coursera, which is not a bad thing. edX has a smaller but growing list of institutional partners featuring top notch schools including Cornell University, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California, Berkley. edX also offers considerably fewer courses (145 to Coursera’s 606), but the courses it does have are high quality, have a lot of content and depth and span a wide range of educational disciples.

Courses on edX are taught by university professors and consist of weekly lecture videos divided up into small segments and interspersed with quiz questions to make sure students are following along and understanding the material. Since edX courses are generally adapted from university courses, they tend to offers students a wealth of content and depth. Classes usually follow a strict session schedule, but some courses, like Harvard’s excellent introductory computer science course CS50x, are self-paced. Grading criteria vary from one class to the next; it’s typically a combination of completing content, quizzes and exams and in some cases completing extra assignments.

The edX website is polished and the course sites themselves are laid out very well. The content is arranged by week, making it easy to follow along and find all the lectures, quizzes and other materials that are related to one another quickly. Courses also have a progress button that you view your grades on all quizzes and exams in one place. In terms web user experience with the course materials themselves, edX is the best the web has to offer. The course search tools aren’t quite as easy to use as those offered by Coursera due to the use of dropdown lists instead of plainly visible checkboxes, but that is only a minor gripe: you only have to find and enroll in courses once every few months.

Courses on edX have discussion forums but they aren’t laid out in the most intuitive way so they take a bit of getting used to. The forums tend to be fairly active when classes are in session, since students all have to move along at the same pace in order to keep up with deadlines.

edX offers free certificates of completion on as well as a paid “Verified Track” option on select courses that matches your personal identity to your work and grants you an ID verified certificate. The cost of the Verified Track requires a minimum donation of $25 to $100 depending on the course. As a non-profit, edX is committed to keeping all courses free for students to audit, even those that offer a paid certificate option.

Bottom line: edX offers top-notch instruction and course materials but it could stand to expand its course offerings.

edX Pros and Cons:

Pros	Cons
Course materials laid out well.	Some courses are not always available.
Instructors are professors.	No career services.
Good use of in-lecture quizzes.	Some lecture videos long.
Large amount of content per course.	Forums are confusing at first glance.

edX Ratings (1=poor, 2=fair, 3=good, 4=very good, 5= excellent):

Website User Experience	Quality of Instruction	Amount and Depth of Content	Community Interaction and Support	Certificates, Career Services and Other Features	Total Score
4	5	4	3	3	19

#3

Udacity is a MOOC platform founded by Google robotics engineer Sebastian Thurn that breaks from the online liberal arts mold set by Coursera and edX. While Udacity has a few university partners, it specializes in courses in computer science, data science and web design. Many of Udacity’s strategic partners are tech companies, like Google, Nvidia and Salesforce, with an interest in creating more skilled computer scientists. With a narrower focus, Udacity offers considerably less content than Coursera or edX, with 33 courses in total. Most Udacity courses use the Python programming language.

Since Udacity instructors are often industry experts instead of professors, courses are typically built from the ground up just for Udacity. Building courses from the ground up instead of adapting offline university courses for the web has some major implications on the content: it allows Udacity to offer a highly interactive experience with frequent in-lecture quizzes and programming challenges, but it also means courses sometimes don’t cover topics in as much depth as would be ideal. As a result, Udacity courses can be a bit hit or miss. Some classes, like CS101 are very well-made, while there are some lemons, like HTML5 Game Development, that should be revamped or removed entirely.

The Udacity website has gone through a few different iterations over the years and the current version is well organized and aesthetically appealing. Course sites are well organized and set up in a way that gives students a solid sense of progression. On the down side, courses tend to have long initial loading times, which can be annoying when you are switching between lessons frequently, using multiple windows or stuck on a slow internet connection. Course search tools are limited but advanced filtering capabilities aren’t really necessary with only 33 courses.

Courses on Udacity are self-paced and ungraded, which allows students to progress at different rates and access material long after courses launch. Self-paced courses are nice for advanced students who want to plow through content as fast as possible, but they also mean students are not always on the same page. The Udacity forums tend to be moderately active when courses first launch, but since students work on different parts courses at different times, getting responses in the forums is not always easy. If you start a course a few months after it launches, you’ll be lucky to get a response to questions you post in the forums within a week, if ever.

Udacity offers free certificates of completion for its courses if you get through all the videos, in-lecture quizzes, homework problems and exams. Completing courses can be challenging since homework and exams typically take the form of programming problems rather than multiple-choice tests. This challenge can be compounded by the fact that the Udacity auto graders sometimes reject solutions that work in offline environments but don’t jive with Udacity online coding environment for one reason or another.

Starting in 2014, Udacity also offers a paid “full course experience” option on select courses that grants students an ID verified certificate as well as access to special in-class projects, personalized feedback and code reviews, guidance from a coach and pacing support. The paid track costs $100 to $200 per month that a course runs, which is considerably more expensive than the verified certificate options on Coursera and edX. All courses still offer a freeware version with full access to course content like videos and exercises, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see Udacity roll out some pay-only courses in the future because the site seems to be going in the direction of professional and vocational training rather than sticking with university style computer science classes.

Bottom line: Udacity is a compelling platform for learning computer science, but the site has some hiccups and certain courses lack depth.

Udacity Pros and Cons:

Pros	Cons
High amount of interactivity with quizzes and coding.	Website has long initial loading times.
Videos separated into digestible  segments.	Forums often inactive.
Course content always available.	Narrow subject focus.
Coding environment built in.	Code auto graders can be buggy.
Paid option grants extra benefits.

Udacity Ratings (1=poor, 2=fair, 3=good, 4=very good, 5= excellent):

Website User Experience	Quality of Instruction and Materials	Amount and Depth of Content	Community Interaction and Support	Certificates, Career Services and Other Features	Total Score (out of 25)
3	4	3	3	4	17

#4

                                         

Khan Academy is an online learning portal built by MIT and Harvard Business Grad Salaman Khan. The site focuses on a younger demographic than the other top MOOC platforms, with many courses focusing on concepts students can expect to encounter in high school, middle school or even grade school. As such, Khan Academy doesn’t follow a rigid structure of enrolling in self-contained courses: students are free to peruse all the material on the site right from the main user dashboard.

The content on the Khan Academy is the product of many years of Salaman Khan’s personal blood, sweat and tears. Although the site features a few topics covered by strategic partners like The Museum of Modern Art and the California Academy of Sciences, the vast majority of the videos on the site are lectures produced by Khan himself. Khan is surely an intelligent man, but one man can’t be an expert in every subject area. Khan seems to be in his element teaching math and economics, but it would behoove him to enlist the help of other educators to help him produce content in fields that lie a bit outside his wheelhouse.

The best part about the Khan Academy site is that it has a huge number of high quality, interactive math exercises and a progress tracking system that helps students work toward mastery of math from basic arithmetic to foundational concepts in calculus and statistics. The site also has a badge and point system that rewards users for watching videos and answering questions. Even as an adult, it is fun to rack up points and badges working math problems from time to time.

The Khan Academy website itself is well made and responsive. Course materials are organized by subject area and are all easily accessible from a single menu. The lecture videos typically take the form of Khan writing in colored pens on a black background with a voiceover explaining what he is writing on the screen. I personally find black backgrounds unappealing and words on black backgrounds are harder for me to read than words on white backgrounds. The lecture videos have a YouTube-style comment sections, but there are no true community forums for students to discuss content in detail. Khan academy doesn’t offer certificates of any sort beyond the badges and points you earn. All of the materials are free and will likely remain that way since the site is nonprofit and its mission is to provide a free world class education to anyone anywhere.

Bottom Line: Khan Academy is a great place for kids to learn math and science and for adults to brush up, but students seeking university level content should explore other options.

Khan Academy Pros and Cons:

Pros	Cons
Website easy to navigate.	Limited content depth.
Fun badge and point system.	Video comment boards instead of forums.
Many quality exercises for math mastery.	Majority of content produced by one person.
Interesting skill map feature.	Limited instructor face time.
Good for kids.	Bad in-lecture color scheme.

Khan Academy Ratings (1=poor, 2=fair, 3=good, 4=very good, 5= excellent):

Website User Experience	Quality of Instruction and Materials	Amount and Depth of Content	Community Interaction and Support	Certificates, Career Services and Other Features	Total Score (out of 25)
4	3	3	2	3	15

#5

MIT OpenCourseWare is the dinosaur of online education. It’s old, enormous and parts that you wish were there are sometimes missing. Over the years MIT has amassed a catalog of over 2000 free courses. The platform offers dozens of courses in all subject areas, but the most popular ones are concentrated in the fields of engineering, math and science. Despite its age and the rise new MOOC platforms, MIT continues to upload new courses to OCW each year and tweak the website, keeping it relevant in the modern era of web learning.

MIT OCW courses are essentially web archives of courses taught on the MIT campus. Courses typically consist of lecture videos, which are recordings of actual lecture sessions given in MIT classrooms, digital copies of assignments and exams and sometimes other resources like copies of readings. The main drawback MIT OCW is that the materials available vary greatly from one course to another. Some courses are missing key pieces of content like assignments, assignment solutions, texts or even lecture videos. It can frustrating to look through hundreds of courses searching for topic that you really want to learn only find out that the course has no lecture videos available. One the other hand, OCW offers far more graduate level content than any other online learning provider, so if you’re looking to learn advanced topics, you might be pleasantly surprised—if you’re willing to do some digging. Be aware, however, that many courses are several years old, so if you’re studying a subject that moves fast and you want to be on the cutting edge, you might be disappointed.

The OCW website itself is clean and reasonably responsive. The site lets you search for courses by subject area, department or course number and filter results by various factors like whether the course has lecture videos or online texts available. Course pages are organized in a standard template form, so it’s easy to assess and explore a course’s materials quickly to see if it’s something that interests you. OCW doesn’t offer much in the way of interactivity or special features, which is understandable since MIT is releasing new interactive courses on the edX platform, but a few OCW courses do offer interactive simulations.

OCW doesn’t offer account registration so there is no personal user dashboard to keep track of your classes or forums to discuss material with other independent learners. You don’t get certificates or badges or any other sort of tangible reward for completing courseware; on MIT OCW, knowledge is your reward.

Bottom Line: MIT OCW is a dragon’s hoard of high-level courseware, but many courses are missing content available to on-campus students and it offers little interactivity.

MIT OCW Pros and Cons:

Pros	Cons
Huge amount of courses.	Courses not designed for the web.
High level content available.	Limited interactivity.
New courses still being uploaded.	No forums.
Skilled instructors.	No personal accounts or certificates.

MIT OCW Ratings (1=poor, 2=fair, 3=good, 4=very good, 5= excellent):

Website User Experience	Quality of Instruction and Materials	Amount and Depth of Content	Community Interaction and Support	Certificates, Career Services and Other Features	Total Score (out of 25)
3	4	4	1	1	13

MOOC Provider In-Depth Comparison:

	Coursera	edX	Udacity	MIT OpenCourseWare	Khan Academy
Date Launched	April 2012	May 2012	February 2012	September 2002	September 2006
Number of Courses	606	145	33	2150	41 topic sections
Course Deadlines	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Graded Courses	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Course Availability	Certain courses are only available while they are in active session.	Certain courses are only available while they are in active session.	Courses are self-paced and always available after launch.	Courses are self-paced and always available. Some course materials are not available online.	Courses are self-paced and always available.
Class Forums	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Lecture video comments
Free Honor Code Certificates	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Paid Certificates	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Paid Certificate Cost	$30-90 depending on the course	$25-100 depending on the course	$100-$200 per month of the course	NA	NA
Points and Badges	No	No	No	No	Yes
Language Support	Foreign language courses available. Subtitles in select languages.	Some Chinese and French courses. Subtitles in select languages.	English courses only. Subtitles available in select languages.	Subtitles available in select languages.	Spanish version available. Subtitles in select languages.
Curriculum Focus	Liberal Arts (wide variety of subjects available.).	Liberal Arts (wide variety of subjects available.).	Computer Science, Data Science and Web Development	Liberal arts with an emphasis on Engineering, Science and Mathematics	Mathematics and Science
Career Services	Yes	No	Yes	No	No
Business Type	For-Profit	Non-Profit	For-Profit	Non-Profit	Non-Profit
Key Partners and Collaborators	Stanford, Princeton, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania. (over 100 partners in total)	MIT, Harvard. (33 partners in total)	San Jose State University, Google, Nvidia, SalesForce, Cloudera, Autodesk, Cadence, MongoDB	Irynsoft, China Open Resources for Education	Stanford School of Medicine, The   Museum of Modern Art, California Academy of Sciences, LeBron James