At the end of March, the world’s largest Massive Open Online Course provider Coursera announced that they are offering 100 free courses in response to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Most recently, Coursera added another 35 new courses from its Latin American university partners and extended the deadline.

I analyzed these 135 now-free Coursera courses using Class Central's dataset. And I discovered that 115 of the courses offered certificates that you would normally have to pay for. The other 20 courses were already free but didn’t offer a certificate. The entire list can be found below.

The coronavirus pandemic has contributed to increasing interest in online education. The course directory website I run, Class Central, has seen also seen a huge increase in people interested in learning online.

The ongoing situation has also driven course providers to launch a  number of initiatives. For learners, this means new opportunities. We  are keeping track of these in three lists that we’re continuously  updating:

Screenshot_2020-03-25-Social-Psychology-Coursera-1
A screenshot of one of these courses on Coursera

In fact, we had previously discovered 1,400+ courses that are completely free. Many do have certificates that you need to pay for, but access to all the course materials is free – including the graded assignments.

None of these 115 courses belong to a Coursera Specialization. And Coursera is only keeping them free until the end of July 2020. Now this has further been extended till the end of this year.

Also, I asked Coursera why some people weren’t seeing the discount. After clicking on Go To Class on Class Central, when you arrive to the course page on Coursera, wait for the promotional banner to appear at the top, and only then click on Enroll for Free. If you don’t see the banner, please refresh. This gif shows the steps to follow.

If you were already auditing a course listed here and would like to re-enroll to get the free certificate, here’s how: 1. Log into Coursera. 2. Go to My Courses. 3. Click on the three-dots icon on the top-right of the course card. 4. Click on Unenroll. Then, follow the steps in the gif  to re-enroll with a free certificate.

These courses come from around 50 universities, including:

  • University of Pennsylvania
  • Georgia Tech
  • Johns Hopkins
  • Caltech
  • Duke
  • and Imperial College London.

Some of the courses also come directly from companies like Google and Amazon.

It's also worth noting that eight of these newly-free courses are ranked among Class Central’s best online courses of all time.

Here is the full list of free courses that have free certifications until end of 2020, ranked by their reviews:

Free Spanish Language Certificate Courses