Twenty years ago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) set itself the ambitious goal of making the bulk of their courses available online to learners worldwide. On April 4th, 2001, MIT announced they’d published core educational materials for free through their MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) platform.
Soon, other universities joined in by sharing Open Education Resources (OER) on their university websites, including the Open University, as reported by Class Central: 1000 Open University Free Certificates.
“The idea is simple: to publish all of our course materials online and make them widely available to everyone.” Dick K.P. Yue, Professor, MIT School of Engineering.
A decade later, Harvard and MIT launched the course platform edX. Online course platforms typically offer more interactive learning experiences than OCW platforms, often allowing students to sign up, complete assignments, interact with peers, review courses, and earn badges or certificates of completion.
Class Central has been monitoring the development of the modern online course movement for more than a decade. Nowadays some of the course content may be locked behind a paywall. OCW platforms, by contrast, give educators an opportunity to freely share high-quality educational resources and also leverage them in their own courses.
So we did some research and compiled the following list of OCW platforms launched by institutions worldwide. They offer some of the best teaching and learning materials available for free online.
Some of these institutions are members of Open Education Global, which has more than 200 member organizations and 220 open educators.
If you find an important source missing, please leave a comment below. We’d be happy to include it in our compilation.
Quick Links
For your convenience, we’ve listed all the institutions that maintain an OpenCourseWare platform below. Click to jump to the corresponding section:
More Courses
If you don’t find what you need in the course list below, browse Class Central’s catalog of 250K courses or visit our thematic collections:
OpenCourseWare (OCW) Courses
2500+ MIT Free Online Courses
Launched in 2001, MIT OpenCourseWare offers more than 2,500 courses and resources, provided on their website, which was refreshed in 2022, and on their YouTube channel, which has over 450M views. These courses cover a wide variety of subjects both at the undergraduate and graduate level. The platform’s most popular courses list is updated each month. More learning resources can be found in the MIT Open Learning Library.
Here’s a selection of MIT OpenCourseWare courses:
150+ Stanford Free Online Courses
Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) provides free access to full course materials of popular courses in Engineering. With its Creative Commons license, it allows educators to use Stanford engineering course materials in their own classrooms.
Most of Stanford’s on-campus computer science courses have a companion website. Many are only open to Stanford students. But others are open to everyone, giving access to course materials such as slides, readings, and assignments. Some even provide video lessons — for instance: CS110, CS221, CS229, CS231n, and CS224N.
Class Central has collected 150+ Stanford on-campus courses that are available online.
Stanford Online offers a catalog of extended education, including paid professional certificates, degrees, and free content. Its Youtube channel Stanford Online offers 2.5K videos, including info sessions, webinars, seminars, and courses. The courses include:
