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The Top Free Online University Courses of 2018, Ranked by Popularity (freecodecamp.org)

Posted by msmash on from the closer-look dept.

Free online courses -- also called Massive Open Online Courses -- have quite a year. An anonymous reader shares a blog post: It's been seven years since these courses rose to prominence, when a few Stanford professors decided to offer their courses online free. Since then over over 900 universities have launched over 11,000 courses. And in its seven years these Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have achieved new milestone: 100 million plus learners. [...] At the end of every year, I do an extensive analysis of the MOOC space. To help me with analysis, I send the top MOOC providers a set of questions, one of them being the top enrolled courses of 2018.

The list below contains the top enrolled courses from the major MOOC providers: Coursera, edX, Udacity, and FutureLearn. Combined, these providers represent a big chunk of the MOOC learners (70 million plus). Without further ado, here are the most popular free online university courses of 2018:
Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects from University of California, San Diego.
Machine Learning from Stanford University.
The Science of Well-Being from Yale University.
Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
CS50's Introduction to Computer Science from Harvard University.

1 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Text-based online classes by myid · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've taken online programming classes that were text-based (you read the lessons), and classes that were video-based (you watch a video of the teacher giving the lecture).

    I much prefer text-based classes.

    - You don't have to take notes,

    - there's no misunderstanding of what the teacher said (misunderstanding the spoken word),

    - you can do a search on a word (ex: inherit) to find and read what the teacher said about that subject,

    - you can easily go back and re-read a paragraph that you didn't understand,

    - the sample code is embedded right there in the lesson, and

    - there's much less bandwidth with text than with video.

    I've only found two schools that offer text-based online classes that aren't super expensive: https://www.freecodecamp.org/ and https://ed2go.com/. (ed2go is cheap but not free.) Unfortunately, neither of these schools teaches more advanced stuff like Java Servlets.

    ed2go is mostly text-based, but if necessary, they supply a video. For example, I took an ed2go class in Photoshop. The lessons contained text and images, but they also contained short videos. "Click here, then click there. See how the color changes from blue to red." Those short videos really helped.

    Does anyone know of any other school that offers online classes that are text-based (not video-based)?