Living in the era where our civilization hits new technological achievements every day, makes us evolve the existent things we have in order for them to suit better the environment that we are creating.
One of the things that evolved with these new technological achievements is education. Traditionally, all of us got our education through the educational system, being private or state-owned.
But also, tons of the professors or experts in some of the areas of our studies organized additional courses, where they’ve charged a certain amount of money in order to give you additional knowledge.
This still exists, but with the growth of the internet services, the additional courses, elevated to a global level, since there are tons of websites, that allow you to create courses for tons of people, that can enroll into your courses from every place in the world.
Most of these courses, especially one published on these courses related websites, are charging a certain amount of money, following the traditional business model, that we were talking few lines above, but slightly modified through combining different subscription models.
Now, there are also, tons of free online courses and materials, where you can get excellent quality of information. When we’ve created this website, our idea, and mission what exactly that, to share free educational knowledge, that will allow everyone to learn for free.
Books we recommend you read:
So, in this article, we are going to talk about how can you find and organize free content in order to learn something useful, and not pay for that.
To ensure that this is possible, we are going to talk about examples from our experience, supported by our previous articles, that helped many others, to learn for free and save money.
Now, all of our examples are going to be Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence related since that is the nature of our content and expertise.
We hope that after this you are not going to pay for online courses and academies anymore.
This is how not to pay and get free online courses and free educational materials
In this part, we are going to talk about the ways that will allow you to learn a lot without paying for online courses.
1. YouTube videos
YouTube is a huge, huge database with the free video content in pretty much everything. There are tons of great channels and communities that will help you learn anything. Even the companies are on this train, especially for their opensource projects.
They are organizing tons of conferences, and live examples that will get you solid information that will expand your knowledge. So far, we’ve used YouTube potential several times, even resulting in creating two very useful articles.
One of our best articles is This is The Entire Computer Science Curriculum in 1000 YouTube Videos, where we’ve created a Computer Science curriculum, organized in 4 academic years, which is 8 semesters, each semester having 5 courses in total.
All of this means 40 courses in total. In total, we’ve used 1079 YouTube videos, which cover the curriculum. It is a great way to learn for free, and it is highly supported by our audience, some of them even started creating an entire YouTube playlist with every video, in order to have them in one place. Our other article, using YouTube resources is Top 10 Best Artificial Intelligence YouTube Channels in 2021.
We’ve listed some of the best YouTube channels that have Artificial Intelligence content. These channels helped us during our time in university, and are still a substantial source of knowledge in our professional careers.
2. Free educational materials from the best universities in the world
Some of the biggest universities in the world, like: Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, etc. Have tons of free content, usually in the form of courses.
Using these free resources, we’ve made a couple of articles where we’ve organized these free materials and saved tons of time while creating educational content for everyone interested in this. Some of our best articles in this area are:
- How to Gain a Computer Science Education from MIT University for FREE – If you are familiar with MIT, you’ve probably heard about the MIT OpenCourseWare program. This program is a database of free MIT courses, organized by their best professors. The courses are organized in such a way that they capture the entire university experience by having video lectures, laboratory exercises, and tasks, projects, etc. All of this, by having the comfort of your home, wherever you live, and more importantly a chance to organize them according to your needs and the way you manage your time. The way we organized them in this article is by creating a Computer Science curriculum. As in the YouTube article, the curriculum has 4 academic years, 8 semesters (2 per year), each semester has 5 courses. This makes for 40 courses in total. This article is hugely accepted by our audience, most of them didn’t even know about these free MIT courses, and the ones who knew were having trouble finding time to organize them since all of them are not organized into curriculums which further increases the complexity to learn. Using our knowledge and experience we’ve broken that barrier for the Computer Science related ones. There are also tons of courses from different areas, and we encourage anyone who wants to helps to others, to organize curriculum in other areas and help a huge audience of people to take advantage of these free educational materials.
- FREE Courses from Harvard University to Become Data Scientist – Using the edX platform, Harvard is publishing courses as many other top universities in tons of areas of study. This particular article is analyzing and explaining their Data Science courses. Their Data Science program is organized into 9 courses, that you can enroll in. Each of them is free to enroll and study, but the certificates are not. Our idea and suggestion are that you DO NOT NEED A CERTIFICATE in order to present your knowledge. We have bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science and yet none of our employers so far, asked about it, all of them are interested in projects and applications we’ve built. But if you think you want the certificates, you can get them for $49 each, which brings it in $441 in total for the full program, which is way, way cheaper than your local Web Design academy that will charge you more than $1000 for some useless and outdated CSS and HTML skills, that you can learn in a couple of hours.
- Top 50 FREE Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Engineering and Programming Courses from the Ivy League Universities – In this article, we are listing the best 50 free Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science courses from Ivy League universities. Here we haven’t organized in some form of curriculum, it is just a list of courses in no particular order. But it is still a great database of free information, where you can find certain courses that interest you.
- Top 10 Best FREE Artificial Intelligence Courses from Harvard, MIT and Stanford – This is a list of the 10 most popular courses at the 3 universities in the title of the article. It is nothing specific, just what the people learn the most from the free materials at these 3 universities.
3. Free online courses from course providing websites
Believe it or not, you can find tons of free courses on a course providing websites like Coursera or Udemy. To ensure that this is true, we’ve found every completely free Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence course at Coursera and we’ve created a list of those courses. You can find the list in our article about Top 40 COMPLETELY FREE Coursera Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science Courses.
The courses are completely free, and that is realized by the ability to enroll in the courses using the financial aid provided by the creator of the specific course, which helps underprivileged students to get top-level education. Now, in the list, you will not find some of the most popular courses organized by IBM or some massive company since most of them are free on a 7 days trial period and after that, they charge you to be able to continue to learn.
4. Free educational materials from the big tech companies
The big companies organize some sort of courses or code examples that will help people who want to learn. Now, some of them are free, some of them not really, but, you can make some tweaks in order to get them for free, as we did, obviously.
Our most popular articles from this area are:
- How to Become Machine Learning Specialist in Under 20 Hours from This FREE LinkedIn Course – If you’ve ever created a LinkedIn profile, you probably know about LinkedIn premium. This unlocks tons of abilities for your profile, the most useful being their educational content. There are tons and tons of high-quality content and courses organized and created by some of the best in the industry. Now, when you activate the LinkedIn premium, you must enter credit card details, and you will not get charged in the next 30 days, since it will activate your trial period. A week before the trial period expires, LinkedIn will send you a notification, to remind you that you are going to get charged if you don’t quit the plan. Now, if you want to continue as a premium user you will get charged, but if not, you will quit. This will allow you 30 days of free access to their educational materials, as this article that we’ve created, analyzing their courses that will turn you into a Machine Learning expert.
- You Can Now Learn for FREE: 9 Courses by Google about Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Science – Google has a great program that is a combination of 9 courses that are going to give you knowledge in areas like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data Science. The courses are great for beginners since most of them are assisted with great code examples, that will help you run your models in no time.
- Here’s the Answer on How to Start Machine Learning With Swift for Apple Devices – TensorFlow is an open-source Machine Learning library that supports different language implementations. It is developed by Google. This particular article is an example of you can use it, to create Machine Learning powered applications for Apple devices like the iPhone, Apple Watch, MacBook, iMac, etc. This is just an example of what TensorFlow has. They have even more examples for Python developers, since Python is the most used language, for Machine Learning. Everyone interested in Machine Learning should follow their examples.
- Introduction in Python for Blockchain: How To Use Python for Ethereum – With the rise of cryptocurrencies, everyone wants to get involved with blockchain technologies. One of the most popular ones in the Ethereum and their currency is the Ether. The main language that will allow you to develop for the Ethereum blockchain is Solidity. In recent years, there are tons of libraries, that will allow you to connect to Ethereum using different programming languages. This is an example with Python, that was inspired by their own examples. In our article, we’ve referenced the list that will help you learn Ethereum development for free, directly by the Ethereum organization themselves.
5. Websites with free books
There are a couple of websites, that act as a database for free books, in different areas. We are talking about millions of books per website. Some of them even have books by the biggest publishing houses. In our article about The Best 8 Websites with FREE Computer Science Books, we’ve listed the best 8 websites that will find you the best free Computer Science books but keep, you will find tons of other free books in other areas of study.
Conclusion
We hope that this article will be eye-opening for everyone who wants to learn. As you can see there are tons, and tons of free online courses and free educational materials, that require only your interest and time, and will help you to transform yourself into a great professional, that will go on to get the job of their dreams or start their own company, that will help to many other customers.
So, no more excuses, the only thing between your current situation, and a better future – is yourself, so start learning.
Like with every post we do, we encourage you to continue learning, trying, and creating.