Ultimate Guide To MOOCs: Take Online Courses From Elite Universities

Many of the world’s best professors at the top Universities in the world are now offering some of their best courses for you to lear online. In just the few year, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have taken off with a mission to an open and accessible higher education to anyone in the world with access to the Internet.

If you are thinking of switching careers or going back to school, these online University courses will help you get back in the habit of studying. They can also help you learn the knowledge and skills you need to start a high-paying new career in the digital economy (without going into debt).

There are literally thousands of Universities worldwide that are now providing these interactive courses online. For this ultimate guide to MOOCs, I’ve done some extra research to provide you with their most popular courses and some background on each of these online education providers.

Take Online Courses From Elite Universities:

Each of these MOOC platforms allows you to learn online from some of the best professors at the world’s top Universities. Each online course provider takes a slightly different approach to online learning but they all provide a rich digital classroom that is structured with regular assignments, tests, deadlines and massive communities of fellow learners for discussion and collaboration.

Typically, a course will take 4-7 hours a week of your time. If you don’t want to commit to doing all the required assignments then in many cases you can audit the courses and watch some of the video lectures.

1. Coursera is largest course platform for MOOCs. The company was founded in 2012 by two former Stanford University professors. They have now shifted from individual courses into providing mini-degrees that they call specializations that allow you to learn a new career in under a year.

I have included affiliate links below to their career specialization tracks, which are an innovative new approach to rapidly developing skills for your careers. These specialization tracks provide you with a valuable certificate of completion and they are offered by elite Universities such as the Wharton Business School, the University of Toronto and the University of Michigan.

These specialization tracks can be taken on a per course basis or as an entire career program for less than $500, which is a bargain considering that a single year at many of these schools will cost you $30,000-$40,000 — if you get accepted to study there.

Career Specialization Tracks on Coursera:

2. Udacity was founded by Sebastian Thrun, who is a former professor of computer science at Stanford University and the creator of the artificial intelligence system behind Google’s self-driving cars. He left Stanford to spearhead this new venture soon after the huge success of his online artificial intelligence course in 2011, which attracted over 160,000 students from more than 190 countries.

Udacity’s focus is on college-level courses for building and applying your knowledge of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) disciplines.

Popular Courses on Udacity:

3. EdX is a MOOC platform developed through a partnership between Harvard, MIT and Berkeley. edX is new but expanding quite rapidly. Recently added educational institutions include the University of Texas, Georgetown University, Boston University and the University of Washington.