Feeling Bored and Undereducated? Try Any of These 400 Free Online Courses!

This article is over 12 years old and may contain outdated information

Recommended Videos

Are you an over-educated college graduate unable to find a job? Then why not spend your time between filling out job applications by taking some free online college courses to keep you well ensconced in your ivory tower! While Stanford may have turned lots of heads with their free, graded online courses, there are quite literally hundreds of other courses available online for free. At least 400 of them, according to Open Culture. They cover everything from History to Computer Science to English to Biology, and everything in between.

But 400 is an awful lot to read through, so we’ve broken down a much shorter list for your reading pleasure.

Here’s Geekosystem’s picks for the some of the more interesting classes. I won’t say the best, because there are dozens of fascinating classes on the list. See the whole list here, and read on below for our carefully organized assortment of free online courses.

Probably as close as you’ll get to Hogwarts

Science, Magic and Religion – Courtenay Raiai, UCLA

The title says it all

The Peculiar Modernity of Britain, 1848-2000 – James Vernon, UC Berkeley

Lesser known reichs

The Rise and Fall of the Second Reich – Margaret Anderson, UC Berkeley

Unlock your word horde

Old English in Context – Stuart Lee, Oxford University

Not Shakespeare: Elizabethan and Jacobean Popular Theatre – Oxford

You make it sound so easy!

A Romp through Ethics for Complete Beginners  – Marianne Talbot, Oxford University

Astrobiology and Space Exploration  – Lynn Rotschild, Stanford

Quantum Physics Made Relatively Simple  – Hans Bethe, Cornell University

Geometric Folding Algorithms:Linkages, Origami, Polyhedra  – Erik Demaine, MIT

Things for which you never thought you’d need instruction

Listening to Music – Professor Craig Wright, Yale

Human Happiness – Dacher Keltner, UC Berkeley

Disconcerting

Death – YouTube – iTunes Audio  – Shelly Kagan, Yale

Quantum Computing for the Determined  – Michael Nielsen, The University of Queensland

Words to win scrabble with

Xenophon’s Oeconomicus – Leo Strauss, U Chicago

The Fourier Transform and its Applications  – Brad Osgood, Stanford

Unrelated to the Impending Robot Apocalypse

Artificial Intelligence – Machine Learning – Andrew Ng, Stanford

The Internet, 101

The Future of the Internet – Ramesh Johari, Stanford

Understanding Computers and the Internet – David Malan, Harvard University

The Beauty of Joy of Computing  – Professor Daniel Garcia, UC Berkeley

A semester of unintentional penis jokes

Woods Energy Seminar  – Multiple Professors, Stanford

Ex-Treme field trips

Exploring Black Holes: General Relativity & Astrophysics – Edmund Bertschinger, MIT

That covers a lot of ground

Ethical Challenges in Public Health Interventions: Catastrophic and Routine  – Professor Harvey Kayman, UC Berkeley

(via Open Culture, image via Michael Coghlan)


The Mary Sue is supported by our audience. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn a small affiliate commission. Learn more about our Affiliate Policy
Author