Save Money and Earn a Free Education

Information is the greatest commodity in the world, but with a lot of education in the world being limited to the inside of schools, people with curiosity and a desire to learn may be stuck without the tools to help them. Paying tutors can be expensive and higher education has impossible standards that can cut out people who may have the willingness to learn. Even young adults who have graduated university may seek more knowledge and they can face the same exact problem. With this growing disconnect, individuals and non-profit organizations have addressed this issue by creating online sites that offer many types of knowledge for free. Not only are there sites that offer the information for free, but some also provide high quality tools and guidance to assure the understanding and retention of these ideas. Here are our top five sites for free education:

edX - https://www.edx.org

edX is a non-profit organization started by MIT and Harvard that offers free university level courses to anyone. The best part of this program is that if you complete an XSeries (a number of courses in a similar field), you can earn a certificate that proves your knowledge and ability. This is a huge factor that can help change income mobility around the world, and with the constantly changing business landscape, it can allow people to easily re-educate themselves and have the ability to enter new industries.  The only issue with this site is that the number of courses offered are very limited compared to its competitor, Coursera.

Codecademy  - http://www.codecademy.com

In our technology driven lives, knowing how to code can be an asset for any field.  Codecademy offers courses ranging from simple scripting languages, which can help you build your own e-commerce website or a blog, to more complicated languages that can be used to create full applications.  Learning one of these languages can help you grow your small business or even help start your first one. It is simple to start and it doesn’t require any previous knowledge to start the course and understand the material.

Khan Academy - https://www.khanacademy.org

As one of the most well known non-profit organizations, Khan Academy has brought meaningful education to many people around the world. Courses cover every single subject, from financial derivatives to medieval history. Salman Khan started the organization in 2006 and since then, many individuals and institutions have recognized it as being one of the best educational tools, such as Bill Gates and Google. Whether you are a child in poverty to a high school student trying to pass their final, Khan Academy is, and continues to be, a great utility to all.

Coursera - https://www.coursera.org

If you are seeking a more reputable and in-depth type of education, Coursea also provides full university created courses for free. You can learn science, business, law and many other subjects, in a range of languages, from top universities around the globe. They also provide a certificate for completing certain courses and completing certain specializations, like edX, but they also have a larger number of courses that do not have a fixed timeline, which edX does not have. This site offers courses from McMaster University, University of Toronto, Stanford University, Yale University and even Princeton University (just to name a few).

Udemy - http://www.udemy.com

Udemy is a marketplace educational site that offers free courses and premium paid courses. This site differs from the others in that an individual (separate from Udemy) actually runs the course and can offer feedback. Additionally, there are no controls on the quality and accuracy of the information provided, which may be an issue for certain courses. We recommend taking a look at this site and checking if there may be something interesting that other sites do not provide, but the other sites noted before do provide higher quality content. The amount of content on this site defiantly outmatches the previous sites.