Academic Courses
Harvard Extension
Harvard Extension features free online education courses from Harvard only. This is another excellent source for top notch course material, though the course variety is less rich than multi-school sites. Additionally, Harvard Extension allows you to search for courses by professional certificate. This makes it much easier if your online education goal includes certification.
MIT OpenCourseWare
MIT offers a variety of free courses. The school has a comparable number of courses to the schools above, plus includes very in-depth course materials on the subjects available. MIT also offers free RSS feeds, a convenient way to continue learning.
Stanford Online
Aiming to promote life-long learning and share knowledge with the general public, Stanford University has put extensive efforts into providing free online courses to anyone, anywhere.
UC Berkeley Class Central
UC Berkeley has a variety of free online education options. The school has slightly fewer courses than the schools above, but includes some supplementary lectures, webcasts and RSS Feeds, making it easy to keep up with the topics you choose.
Open Yale Courses
Open Yale Courses offers a lot of videos of actual campus lectures. The availability of videos makes the site a great option if you’re looking for quality courses, but learn better by watching than by reading.
Certificated Courses
Alison
Alison's Certificate courses are a range of free online courses that are designed to provide training that's as streamlined and to-the-point as possible. Built for learners of any ability or knowledge level, each of these free online courses takes less than 3 hours to complete and provides training in a single topic in clear detail. And with over 900 Certificate classes available, whether you want to learn specific French vocabulary or take classes in how to conduct a business meeting, Alison has the Certificate for you. So, what will you learn today?
Podcasts
BBC Podcasts
For the more casual learner, the BBC offers a wide variety of podcasts on many different topics. Most podcasts are updated weekly, and focus on everything from finance, to sports, to current events. Through the World Service line of podcasts, there are also many in different languages. The focus of these podcasts are less in-depth and theory based, which may be more accessible to the average person.
University of London Podcasts
The podcast page on the University of London website is another great source for free education. While the courses are limited to podcasts, the site features podcasts from it’s own campus, as well as eleven universities in and around London. This gives learners a wide base of topics and lectures, but still ensures in-depth material.
University of Oxford Podcasts
University of Oxford features many different podcasts. Most are public lecture series or lectures from visiting professors, with several different recordings available. The advantage to this particular site is that podcasts are organized into series, making it easy to subscribe to multiple lectures on one topic. Another good site for thoroughly in-depth lectures.
Ted-Ed
Another great destination for more general learning is TED-Ed. From the same people that brought you the all encompassing, motivational web series, comes a site chocked full of educational videos. Most include impressive animation, and all are ten minutes long or less.
Tutoring
Khan Academy
You can learn anything. Expert-created content and resources for every course and level. Always free.