Online Learning Beyond Columbia

Below are select sites offering online learning programs beyond Columbia University.

Coursera partners with top universities to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. Coursera envisions a future where the these universities educate not only thousands of students, but millions.

edX is a joint partnership between Harvard and MIT (see also MITx) that offers fully online courses to anyone in the world, for free. The edX open-source learning platform provides online self-paced courses, features collaborative tools and resources, offers assessment, and even provides online laboratories.

Udacity (University + Audacity) is the name coined by Sebastian Thrun, who left Stanford to lead a global online university that offers computer sciences classes in a virtual global environment to any learner, novice and expert alike.

Khan Academy boasts self-paced study on the sciences and humanities. Often these courses are used to supplement material taught in K-12 classrooms. Learners are assessed, and their teachers they may retrieve learning statistics to determine what content has been mastered and which requires more review.

University of the People is a tuition-free online university devoted to providing universal access to quality, online post-secondary education to qualified students. UoPeople is led by a number of former Columbia administrators, including David Cohen, the University's former vice president and dean of the Faculty for Arts & Sciences at Columbia University, who serves as UoPeople's provost.

Open University in the United Kingdom offers courses on 12 subject areas to anyone in the world. Students pay a modest fee for courses and certificate programs.

Peer-to-Peer University (P2PU) is a peer-based global learning system whose premise is that some of the best learning is peer-based. P2P partners with external organizations to cluster courses and create reputable schools of open learning. Examples include the P2PU/Mozilla School of Webcraft, School of Data with Open Knowledge Foundation, School of Social Innovation, School of Ed, and School of Maths.

Yale University offers Open Yale Courses, which are available in high-definition video and audio. Learners may access these courses anytime, from anywhere, but participants do not interact with professors, nor are they awarded Yale credit.