Online courses, and massively open online courses (MOOCs) in particular, are quickly moving from a novelty to the mainstream. Leading colleges, graduate schools, and companies are investing significant resources into free education.
There are now hundreds of free courses available online, which can vary significantly in quality. That makes it essential to pick the right course.
We've found some of the most fascinating, highly regarded, and useful courses around, taught by some of the most accomplished professors at the best schools in the world.
If you take a class through a platform that runs more structured courses, like EdX or Coursera, it can be beneficial to take them in session. Then, you can get assignments graded, occasionally have access to teaching assistants and even professors, and have a community of other people taking the course that you can talk to and rely on. And if you do well enough, you'll receive a verified certificate for completing the course.
Some of the following courses are running right now, while others have already concluded but can still be taken as self-paced courses. We've noted which is the case for each.
Coursera/Duke: A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior
Platform: Coursera
Length/Start date: The course ran this spring and all materials are available. It's designed to last eight weeks.
Time commitment: Seven to 10 hours a week, and no background is required other than a "curiosity about human nature."
Why you should take it: People aren't always rational. They do unpredictable things that are often baffling to those who try to think rationally.
The course is taught by Duke's Dan Ariely, author of the best selling "Predictably Irrational" and one of the most prominent scholars studying this through the lens of behavioral economics. A student who's taken 36 MOOCs said it was the one he'd most recommend to a first-time MOOC student.
The idea is to introduce students to the range of cases where people make decisions inconsistent with standard economic theory, which assumes rational decision making, and think about how insights about that sort of behavior can be applied.
Udacity: Introduction to Statistics
Platform: Udacity
Length/Start date: Self paced
Time commitment/prerequisites: The time commitment is entirely up to the student, though those looking to complete it should set themselves some goals. No prerequisites are required other than basic algebra. There is a programming track which uses Python, however.
Why you should take it: Statistics and data analysis are at the core of just about everything in business. Knowing how to read data and pull insight out of it is always useful. This course provides a tool-set that would be valuable to just about anybody.
This course is designed to teach the basics of extracting meaning from data, visualizing it, and understanding the relationships in data with math. The course is taught by Udacity CEO and Stanford Research professor Sebastian Thrun, who founded Google X, the company's research lab, and helped develop driverless cars and Google Glass.
MIT: Introduction to Microeconomics
Platform: MIT OpenCourseWare
Length/Start date: Self paced
Time commitment/prerequisites: The course is taken entirely independently. It's the first economics course undergraduates take, so no background is needed there. Some basic, single variable calculus is required, but no more than you'd learn in a high school calculus class.
Why you should take it: Economics has a bad reputation, but it's absolutely vital.
This introductory microeconomics class is one of the most popular that MIT has made available, and is taught by Jonathan Gruber. He's been teaching there for 20 years and is an extremely prominent economist who helped design Massachusetts' groundbreaking health-care reform.
Economics, and microeconomics in particular, are about how we make the best decision given scarce resources like money or time. That's useful in itself, as is this course as background for more advanced work.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider