Three Places to Search for Free Online Courses

The summer is a great time for us to learn new skills, refresh our memories on topic that we'll be teaching in the fall, and just satisfy intellectual curiosities. The boom in MOOC and other online course offerings means that we don't have to go far to find courses that meet our needs. Here are three places to find your next free, online course.

Open Culture, which I've featured here many times, has a list of more than 700 free online courses. Some of the courses are canned content in the form of recorded lectures while others are course that will be available this summer. Unfortunately, there isn't a search tool on Open Culture just for the courses so you'll have to scroll through the lists to find what you want.

RedHoop is a search engine for online courses that I learned about from a recent Life Hacker post. RedHoop allows you to search for courses from popular providers including Coursera, Udemy, and Udacity. You can refine your search to show only free courses.

SkilledUp, like RedHoop, is a search engine for online courses. You can filter search results according to cost and course provider. SkilledUp indexes more course providers than RedHoop, but many of those course providers are paid services. I do like that SkilledUp allows you to refine your search according to content delivery method. For example, I can filter out courses that are lecture-based.