Online Learning

College Credit MOOCs that Are Still Free to Access

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 06/20/18

It has become a truism that MOOCs aren't always open anymore. Increasingly, courses pegged as massive, open and online are actually intended for use in for-credit programs that help people earn partial degrees (as long as they're enrolled in a university program and pay tuition). Sometimes these courses can't even be audited by people who are interested in the subject but don't necessarily want the credit or fees.

Class Central recently made a list of all the courses it could locate that are part of for-credit programs and are still free to access. There are 370 of them, according to the company, which operates an online MOOC search engine and curates a MOOC catalog. According to publisher Dhawal Shah, the search found offerings from 49 different universities, with subjects "spanning technology, business, the arts and engineering."

The list is organized by discipline: business, computer science, data science, art and design, engineering, social sciences, personal development, programming, health and medicine, science, education and teaching, humanities and mathematics.

Among the most popular, according to Class Central rankings, are these offerings:

• Marketing in a Digital World from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on Coursera;
• Creative Applications of Deep Learning with TensorFlow on Kadenze Academy;
• Python for Data Science from University of California, San Diego on edX;
• Introduction to Programming for Musicians and Digital Artists from California Institute of the Arts on Kadenze Academy;
• Sound Production in Ableton Live for Musicians and Artists from California Institute of the Arts on Kadenze Academy; and
• Artificial Intelligence for Robotics from Stanford University on Udacity.