Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are free online courses available for anyone to enroll. MOOCs provide an affordable and flexible way to learn new skills, advance your career and deliver quality educational experiences at scale.
National Programme for Technology Enhanced Learning a joint initiative from IITs and IISc to offer online courses and certification in various topics.
Learn for free; Pay a small fee to write an exam and get a certificate.
OpenCourseWare (OCW) are course lessons created at universities and published for free via the Internet. OCW projects first appeared in the late 1990s, and after gaining traction in Europe and then the United States have become a worldwide means of delivering educational content. OCW movement took off with the launch of MIT OpenCourseWare at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University in October 2002. The movement was soon reinforced by the launch of similar projects at Yale, Utah State University, the University of Michigan, and the University of California Berkeley. Course in OCW typically contain video and audio lectures, PDF slides, Lecture Notes, Class Assignments, Unit test, Mini Projects based on course learning, interactive simulations, online textbooks, calendars, syllabi, exams and supplementary materials.
| Sr. No | Name of University | Country | Website |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | USA | https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm |
| 2 | Stanford University | USA | https://online.stanford.edu/ |
| 3 | Harvard University | USA | https://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative |
| 4 | California Institute of Technology | USA | http://online.caltech.edu/ |
| 5 | University of Oxford | UK | http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/open |
| 6 | University of Cambridge | UK | https://www.langcen.cam.ac.uk/opencourseware/opencourseware-index.html |
| 7 | University of California, Berkeley | USA | https://www.berkeley.edu/academics/online-learning |
| 8 | Yale University | USA | https://oyc.yale.edu/ |
| 9 | University of Michigan | USA | https://open.umich.edu/ |
| 10 | Carnegie Mellon | USA | https://oli.cmu.edu/ |
| 11 | The University of Notre Dame | USA | https://www.edx.org/school/notredamex |
edX is a massive open online course (MOOC) provider. It hosts online university-level courses in a wide range of disciplines to a worldwide student body, including some courses at no charge. It also conducts research into learning based on how people use its platform. EdX is a nonprofit organization and runs on the free Open edX open-source software platform.
EdX was founded in May 2012 by scientists from Harvard and MIT. Gerry Sussman, AnantAgarwal, Chris Terman, and PiotrMitros taught the first edX course on circuits and electronics from MIT, drawing 155,000 students from 162 countries. In 2013 they partnered with Stanford and in June 2013 they reached 1 million students.edx.org released as open source, creating Open edX.
SWAYAM is a programme initiated by Government of India and designed to achieve the three cardinal principles of Education Policy viz., access, equity and quality. The objective of this effort is to take the best teaching learning resources to all, including the most disadvantaged. SWAYAM seeks to bridge the digital divide for students who have hitherto remained untouched by the digital revolution and have not been able to join the mainstream of the knowledge economy.
This is done through an indigenous developed IT platform that facilitates hosting of all the courses, taught in classrooms from 9th class till post-graduation to be accessed by anyone, anywhere at any time. All the courses are interactive, prepared by the best teachers in the country and are available, free of cost to the residents in India. More than 1,000 specially chosen faculty and teachers from across the Country have participated in preparing these courses.
The courses hosted on SWAYAM are in 4 quadrants – (1) video lecture, (2) specially prepared reading material that can be downloaded/printed (3) self-assessment tests through tests and quizzes and (4) an online discussion forum for clearing the doubts.
TED Conferences LLC (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a media organization that posts talks online for free distribution under the slogan “ideas worth spreading.” TED was conceived by Richard Saul Wurman in February 1984 as a conference; it has been held annually since 1990.TED’s early emphasis was on technology and design, consistent with its Silicon Valley origins. It has since broadened its perspective to include talks on many scientific, cultural, political, and academic topics.
Since June 2006,TED Talks have been offered for free viewing online, under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives Creative Commons license, through TED.com. As of January 2018, over 2,600 TED Talks are freely available on the website.In June 2011, TED Talks’ combined viewing figure stood at more than 500 million,and by November 2012, TED Talks had been watched over one billion times worldwide. TED Talks given by academics tend to be watched more online while art and design videos tend to be watched less than average.
YouTube is an American video-sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California. Three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—created the service in February 2005. Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion; YouTube now operates as one of Google’s subsidiaries
As of February 2017, there were more than 400 hours of content uploaded to YouTube each minute, and one billion hours of content being watched on YouTube every day. As of August 2018, the website is ranked as the second-most popular site in the world, according to Alexa Internet.
Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free encyclopedia based on a model of openly editable and viewable content, a wiki. It is the largest and most popular general reference work on the World Wide Web,and is one of the most popular websites by Alexa rank. It is owned and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that operates on money it receives from donors.
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.Sanger coined its name,as a portmanteau of wiki (the Hawai’ian word for “quick”) and “encyclopedia”. Initially an English-language encyclopedia, versions in other languages were quickly developed. With 5,826,703 articles, the English Wikipedia is the largest of the more than 290 Wikipedia encyclopedias. Overall, Wikipedia comprises more than 40 million articles in 301 different languages and by February 2014 it had reached 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors per month.