(Written by Manoel with latest updates by Pat.)
To support continuing medical education (CME), many universities — including top institutions like Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Yale — offer free medical online courses and webinars.
These include free certificates of completion like the ones above, and often also a transcript. Furthermore, if you’re a healthcare professional, they also carry continuing medical education credit (CME credit).
I’ve scoured the web in search of platforms that offer free medical courses, testing these platforms one by one, and collecting a dozen free certificates along the way, including five from Ivy League schools.
In this Class Central article, I’ve compiled all the platforms I’ve found. Combined, they offer over 1000 medical online courses and webinars, with free certificates and CME credit.
We recommend you take careful note of any dates mentioned on course pages. For example, many have an end date, after which the certificate and CME credit are no longer available. You may still be able to watch the videos, but cannot gain recognition after the closing date.
We’ll continue to update this article as we find more platforms. If you know a platform that fits the article and isn’t listed below yet, please share it in the comments.
Understanding Continuing Medical Education (CME)
Medical research is very active. Every year in the US, more students earn doctoral degrees in life sciences than in any other field. And in most EU countries, medical sciences are the primary recipients of research funding. This is only natural. We’re talking about people’s health. The stakes are high.
Since the medical field evolves rapidly, lifelong learning is an integral part of medical professions. Continuing medical education (CME) simply formalizes this necessity. It consists of activities, including courses and webinars, that allow healthcare professionals to keep up with development in their fields.
These activities lead to certificates and carry continuing medical education credit (CME credit) in proportion with the activities’ length and depth. In many places around the world, healthcare professionals must earn CME credit on an ongoing basis to demonstrate their continued competency.
While primarily geared toward healthcare professionals, fortunately, these activities are often accessible to everyone, even those of us who don’t work in healthcare. And sometimes, they’re even free. In this article, we focus on online platforms that offer free CME resources available to everyone.
Enrolling in CME Courses
After spending some time researching CME platforms, you start to notice some patterns.
For one, most med schools offer CME activities. Some only organize in-person activities. But often, they also offer online activities in the form of courses or webinar recordings — so called enduring or on-demand materials.
Additionally, universities typically rely on third-party platforms to organize their online CME activities and issue certificates. A couple of platforms seem to be particularly popular. I’ve come across these quite often:
- CloudCME — used by Stanford and Johns Hopkins, among others
- EthosCE — used by Brown and Chicago, among others.
The advantage of these platforms being popular is that once you’ve tried them, you’ll feel comfortable navigating the CME platforms of most universities, at least US-based ones.
The sign up process, in particular, is almost always the same. Compared to platforms like Coursera, CME platforms tend to ask for more information, including your phone number, address, and current degree.
If you don’t want to share that information, you can just fill in random values. They don’t verify phone numbers. But know that the degree information you input will usually be appended to your name on certificates, and the address will typically show up on your transcript, so you might want to fill in sensible values.
Earning CME Certificates
After finishing an online CME activity, you’ll have to complete a posttest to demonstrate your learning. These typically involve 2 to 10 multiple-choice questions, specifically about the activity’s content.
Some instructors make their posttests very easy — sometimes concerningly so, since some posttests just involve ticking a checkbox promising that you’ve watched the CME videos in full. I found this a bit alarming, considering these activities are used for the ongoing validation of clinicians’ knowledge.
Other instructors make their posttests quite difficult, testing learners on minute and sometimes subjective details, verifying programmatically that the learner watched the CME videos in full before unlocking the posttest, and allowing learners only two attempts to pass the posttest.
If you achieve a passing grade in your posttest, you’ll typically be asked to fill a survey evaluating the quality of the CME activity. Once you’ve filled the survey, you’ll have access to your certificate of completion, or the certificate will be emailed to you within a day.
Additionally, most platforms will also allow you to access and print a transcript listing all the CME activities you’ve completed on the platform. You can see my Stanford transcript above.
CME Platforms
Here are the CME platforms I’ve explored. Combined, they offer over 1000 CME activities, most of them with free certificates, and for healthcare professionals, CME credit. As mentioned above, if you need the certificate or CME credits, check that the course is still offering them, since many courses do not offer certificates or credits after a particular date.
We’ll continue to expand the list as we find new platforms. If you have other recommendations, please share them in the comments.
Stanford Free CME Courses
Stanford Medicine offers more than 750 online learning resources in the medical field, from podcasts to full-fledged courses, many including free certificates of completion and CME credit. Learners also have access to a formal transcript from Stanford, listing all the training they’ve completed.
Here are some of the free resources available on the platform:
You can find Stanford’s entire CME catalog here.
If you’d like to learn more about Stanford CME, I’ve written a detailed article about the platform: Stanford Medicine Offers Courses with Free Certificate & CME Credit.
Johns Hopkins Free CME Courses
Johns Hopkins University offers close to 300 online CME activities, including mini-courses, webinars, and grand rounds, which involve discussing specific patients, their treatment, and outcomes, to turn these cases into learning opportunities.
Here are some of the free resources available on the platform:
You can find John
