Free online courses to take during the one month quarantine

With the government’s order to suspend classes until April 12, students have a lot of free time. While spending your days online, playing video games, and chatting with friends is a fun relief from the stress from school, you might want to consider doing something productive. Learning a new field or skill, like coding and video editing or taking classes in the fields of Mathematics, Science, and Economics, all seem to be a better way to spend your time than browsing through Facebook, TikTok, or Reddit all day.

To help you get started, we listed websites that offer free online courses on different skills and topics for you to spend your free month productively. All of the websites offer courses free of charge, with an option to pay for certificates, degrees, and other resources.

Google Digital Garage

People looking to get into digital marketing, starting an online business, coding, and the like should look no further than Google’s Digital Garage. It has a lot of learning material from Google and other partnered online portals that are free to use. Their courses vary from being purely text-based to having video, broken down into modules for easier digestion. At the end of each lesson, there will be an online quiz for you to take and gauge how well you understood the topic discussed.

Some courses also have certificates that you can earn by completing all modules and passing all the tests given throughout the course.

Khan Academy

Khan Academy is a popular site backed by charitable foundations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Valhalla Charitable Foundation, Bank of America, Fundacao Lemann, and more. They offer free resources on fields such as Math, Science, Economics and Finance, Arts and Humanities, Computing, and other topics.

After signing up on the website, you’ll be given choices on specific topics under the fields for you to learn. After choosing the courses you’d like to take, you’ll be redirected to a dashboard where you may begin learning. These courses are broken down into modules, and you can watch the video lessons at your own pace.

edX

edX is a massive open online course site founded by Harvard and MIT that allows people to learn courses at their own pace. Today, they have partnered with other universities, including Berkeley University, The University of Texas System, Boston University, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Stanford Online, and more. edX is a nonprofit organization that has almost 3,000 courses on different topics to learn. They also offer certification, that legitimizes your learning for a fee.

Like Khan Academy, singing up is free, and you’ll be able to access modularized courses for you to learn at your own pace. The modules are divided into weeks and contain lecture notes, slides, transcripts, and a problem set to solve every week.

Coursera

Similar to edX, Coursera is another massive open online course (MOOC) site that offers courses in Arts and Humanities, Business, Computer Science, Data Science, IT, Health, Math and Logic, Engineering, Language, and more. They’ve collaborated with over 190 leading companies and universities, including Google, Duke University, IBM, Stanford, and more.

Coursera offers free and paid courses, as well as professional certificates and online degrees on its platform. Unlike the other MOOC platforms that have their courses archived, courses on Coursera are scheduled; hence users must wait for the classes to start before taking them.

Video Copilot

If video editing, animation, and special effects are more your cup of tea, then you could look into Video Copilot. While they don’t have a traditional online course for you to enroll in, they have 169 tutorial videos to date on specific effects that you could use to better your videos.

While their videos might be free, some of the 3D packs, presets, and resources they use are paid, so be sure to check out the necessary tools to recreate the effects they’re using.

And there you have it! A list of websites that offer free online courses and training for you to use during the one month quarantine. If you find a course you like, you could also get a certificate to boost your CV and open the doors to more jobs for you in the future.