Free College Courses Online

It's easy to miss among the hype for earning college degrees online the availability of single college courses online.

If you know where to look you can find online college courses in everything from accounting to zoology, African Studies and even, ironically, Distance Education.

Depending upon the school, you might even be able to find great college courses online without having to spend one cent on tuition.

Who'da thunk it? Free college for everyone.

Free College Courses

Some of the most prestigious colleges and universities offer college courses online for free. You typically won't receive credit but you will gain the same knowledge as students paying thousands of dollars to learn the same information. I used the word typically when discussing course credit because some colleges and universities do offer credit for these online courses to existing degree students with prior approval.

Berkeley and a number of other top notch universities are offering free online college courses in the form of open courseware.

Why take free college courses online if they don't give credits?

There are a myriad of reasons why someone would take college courses online even if they do not recieve credit for their efforts. The following are just a few of the reasons why someone may with to take such courses.

• Back in the days when the Internet was new, a course in my graduate degree program suddenly had a new pre-requisite that I did not have. It wasn't a strict pre-requisite in that course credit was required but it certainly required knowledge of the topic. There wasn't much online yet at that time, so there were no options to find sites with information on the programming language we all found ourselves suddenly needing. Most of my class had to make a mad scramble to take courses, self-teach themselves or find someone willing to tutor them. Instead of suddenly finding myself in a community college night course two nights a week along with my weekend graduate courses and still trying to work 50-60 hours a week; I could have taken the missing course online, for free, on my own schedule.
   
• Perhaps you are a returning student who, with time, has forgotten some of the finer points of your earlier college work. Taking a free non-credit college course online might be the perfect solution to bone up on a topic without delaying getting started on your new classwork.
   
• Let's face it, not everyone standing in front of a classroom can teach. Every school from elementary school to post-graduate school has at least one faculty member who does not teach well. Or maybe you have a great professor, if only you could understand them through their thick foreign accent. By taking similar college courses online, you may just be able to pull off that A or B in spite of the poor instruction you are receiving. (Oh, how I had something like this available when I was still in school.)
   
• Many colleges and universities will allow students to test for credit. I don't know about other colleges, but my undergraduate college professors often gave more difficult tests to the students testing for credit. Some professors simply gave the course final. No matter how many years of professional experience people came to the table with, it was rare for them to pass the test on the first try. Professionals can bone up for one of these exams than by taking that same college course online prior to taking the test for credit?
   
• There's also the most simple answer to this question...to learn something new.
   

Taking college courses online might just be the answer to filling your current needs.