15 Stanford University Free Online Courses With Certificates

Do you know you can learn that dream course of yours online without paying a dime? Stanford University offers many free online courses to further inspire innovation and preserve cultural and scientific information for future generations.

One way Stanford University has projected this course is through leveraging on the existence of new media for conducting not just online courses but online free courses for all.

Stanford Online, operated by the Stanford Center for Development, offers learners access to Stanford’s global and extended education online, on campus, and on-site throughout the world.

Most of Stanford Online’s global and extended education is delivered directly via Stanford platforms. Additionally, Stanford collaborates with some third-party organizations to offer specialized educational content on their platforms such as; Coursera, edX, Get smarter, Great learning and many more.

Don’t you think it’s time for you to leverage these opportunities and gainfully benefit from them while they last? Carefully read through for details.

If you’re considering an online degree this year, you can take up any of the 15 Stanford University Online Free Courses.

Before we go further, here’s a highlight of what will be discussed.

Why Choose Stanford University Free Online Courses?

Due to the widespread challenges facing the traditional ways of learning ranging from high costs to a rigorous style and approach to learning and a whole lot more, Stanford University has provided an online alternative to enhance learning. Thus, eliminate any form of hindrances.

You can now afford to study and get certified from the comfort of your home for free.

Here are some reasons why you should make the best out of free online courses offered by Stanford University;

Convenience and Flexibility

Online courses offer you an opportunity to choose a study pattern that accommodates your schedule. You can afford to study amidst tending to other activities ranging from your work to other necessary issues.

It offers a flexible approach to learning as you can combine activities and still cope with the course as long as you’re committed and focused. Course materials are also available online, making special library trips needless.

Check this out: Stanford University Scholarships Opportunities for International Students, 2024-2024 (SHARE)

Little Or No Cost To Be Paid

Online programs present a more affordable option than traditional colleges. Free courses online offer an astonishing package that is highly paid for offline, for free. You tend to pay little or nothing.

Though not all online degrees offer less expensive net tuition prices than traditional colleges, associated expenses almost always cost less.

For example, there are no commuting costs, and sometimes required course materials, such as textbooks, are available online at no cost.

These free online courses can help students fulfill career goals and ambitions.

Variety of Programs and Courses

Online study offers a variety of programs and courses to all. That is to say, you can afford to apply for any course or program you wish to despite your discipline and area of specialization.

For instance, someone with a degree in Medicine can afford to take up an online course in science writing and reporting.

Comfortability

You can take up an online course from start to finish from the comfort of your home, workplace, toilet or even car. That’s how convenient a free online course can be.

Students listen to lectures on and complete assignments sent to them electronically with no need to fight traffic, leave work early for class, or miss important family time.

More Interaction and Greater Ability to Concentrate

It is widely believed that students find it easier to participate and interact in online classes more than face to face offline sessions where there is no form of pressure, shyness, and fear.

Career Advancement

Earning an online degree helps one elevate career-wise as every online course is an added advantage that can be sited in one’s resume thus increase one’s viability and strength status.

Also, earning a degree is a sure sign of ambitiousness to prospective employers and friends at large. You should get an online degree now.

Transfer Credits

For college students who want to attend summer classes, but live too far from their colleges and/or work summer jobs, taking online classes from an accredited college and transferring the credits to their primary college can be highly advantageous.

Summarily, taking free online courses helps students effectively manage their time, learn with online materials, and complete assignments on their own schedules. In the end, it turns out to be an added advantage.

Does Stanford Offer Free Online Courses?

Stanford is not competing to be named among the best universities in the world today. They’ve actually shown their capacity by ranking in the top ten universities in the world with dreams to topple giants like Harvard and MIT soon.

Due to their interest in building education, Stanford offers a good number of free online courses for students all over the world to patake. With this command of free and borderless education, they continue to bridge the ignorance gap.

How To Take Stanford University Online Free Courses

These few tips will help you complete Stanford University online free courses;

Hold Yourself Accountable

You should be aware of the fact that the outcome of the online class solely depends on you. So, it’s your duty to plan yourself, set goals, reminders and prompts to guide you.

 It’s up to you to make sure you’ve allotted enough time to complete the work as at when due.

Be Time Conscious

Creating your own schedule is a highly important task to do while taking online classes. But that freedom can also be ineffective if you do not have a firm time management skills. Without them, you might easily find yourself doing what you didn’t plan to do or what is out of schedule.

However, how you manage your time will depend on your schedule, learning style, and personality, here are some tips that will help you improve your time management skills.

• Look at the syllabus at the start of the semester and make note of major assignments: Marking them on a calendar and you check regularly so you know what workload is coming in the weeks ahead.
• Create a weekly schedule that you understand, by designating certain hours of each week to read, watching lectures, completing assignments, studying, and participating in forums.
• Check-in periodically throughout the term, and look at how you’re spending your time. Ask yourself: How much time am I dedicating to course reading and assignments? A little self-reflection and adjustment can go a long way.

Take The Online Course Serious

I understand there will be distractions and side attractions while taking online courses. But, you need to have the consecration and devotion to actually follow through and stick to the outlined course structure. Treat it like it’s an offline face-to-face lecture where participation is compulsory and you wouldn’t want to miss a class.

Find A Way To Eliminate Distractions

From the buzzing social media updates, calls, YouTube videos and even distractions from friends and family, you’ll be faced with many distractions that are capable of diverting your attention. It will be in your best interest to set aside time for other activities and focus on the online course when it’s time for it.

Adopt A Learning Pattern That Works For You

You need to figure out how you learn best and align your schedule to that pattern. If you like taking classes in the morning, make sure you create time for the online course in the morning likewise if you’re an evening person.

Actively Participate

For you to get the best out of the online course, you need to actively take part in the session through partaking in the assignments, online discussions, question and answer sessions and all that. Through this way, you’ll be able to build yourself through interacting with fellows, teachers and mentors alike.

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Can I Get A Degree From Stanford Online?

Online courses for Stanford degree-seeking students are offered by a few departments. However, online learning at Stanford is designed to support campus-based degree programs. Students who have been admitted to Stanford can enroll in online courses as they are available.

Open learning opportunities are available through Stanford Online, which offers more than 100 massively open online courses, or MOOCs, and at the following locations:

15 Best Free Online Courses at Stanford University

We’ve put together a list of 15 online free courses offered by Stanford University.  Our selection criteria are focused on the duration, nature of course work offered and ease of access. We also considered the quality of education, average earnings of graduates, accreditation, number of enrolled students and several other relevant factors.

Here’s a list of the top 15 free online courses offered by Stanford for you;

• Organizational Analysis
• Design of Computer Programs
• How to Start a Startup
• Writing in the Sciences
• Convolutional Neural Networks
• Introduction to Computer Networking
• International Women’s Health and Human Rights
• Probabilistic Graphical Models 3: Learning
• Social and Economic Networks: Models and Analysis
• Intro to Statistics
• Statistical Learning
• Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
• Programming Max: Structuring Interactive Software for Digital Arts
• Understanding Einstein: The Special Theory of Relativity
• Principles of Computing

#1. Organizational Analysis

In this introductory, self-paced course, you will learn multiple theories of organizational behavior and apply them to actual cases of organizational transformation.

Furthermore, we will use organizational theories to systematically analyze how an organization operates and can best be managed.

Organizational theories highlight certain features of an organization’s structure and environment, as well as its processes of negotiation, production, and change. 

At the end of this course, you will become familiar with a series of real-world organizational phenomena; learn different theoretical perspectives that can elucidate these phenomena; and apply these different ways of “seeing” and managing organizations to cases

The eleven (11) week-long course will start on April 20, 2024. The language of instruction is English.

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#2. Design of Computer Programs

This course will teach you how to approach programming problems and devise a solution that is an essential skill for any Python developer. In this course, you’ll learn new concepts, patterns, and methods that will expand your coding abilities.

This self-paced course will last for eight (8) weeks. The language of instruction is English.

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#3. How to Start a Startup

This Self Paced course is designed to be a sort of one-class business course for people who want to start businesses.

Videos of the lectures, associated reading materials, and assignments will all be available here. There will be 20 videos, some with moderators and a small panel. It’ll be 1,000 minutes of content if you watch it all.

In this free online course, you’ll learn the following;

• how to come up with ideas and evaluate them
• ways to get users and grow
• how to do sales and marketing
• best ways of hiring
• how to raise money company culture, operations and management, business strategy, and lots more.

I bet this is something you don’t want to miss.

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#4. Writing in the Sciences

This course teaches scientists how to be good and effective writers using practical examples and exercises.

Topics to be treated include;

• principles of good writing
• tricks for writing faster and with less anxiety
• the format of a scientific manuscript, and issues in publication and peer review.

Students from non-science disciplines can benefit from the training provided in the first four weeks (on general principles of effective writing).

This self-paced course is scheduled to last for eight (8) weeks.

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#5. Convolutional Neural Networks

This course will teach you how to build convolutional neural networks and apply them to image data.

At the end of this course you will;

• Understand how to build a convolutional neural network, including recent variations such as residual networks.
• Know how to apply convolutional networks to visual detection and recognition tasks.
• Be able to apply these algorithms to a variety of images, videos, and other 2D or 3D data.
• Know to use neural style transfer to generate art.

The four (4) week-long course is billed to start on April 13, 2024. It is taught in English.

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#6. Introduction to Computer Networking

This is a self-paced introductory course on computer networking, particularly the Internet.

It focuses on explaining how the Internet works, ranging from how bits are changed on wires and in wireless to application-level protocols like BitTorrent and HTTP. It also explains the principles of how to design networks and network protocols.

Students will gain experience reading and understanding RFCs (Internet protocol specifications) as statements of what a system should do.

The course teaches many of the concepts in current practice and recent developments, such as net neutrality and DNS security.

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#7. International Women’s Health and Human Rights

This course focuses on women’s health and human rights issues from infancy through old age, including information about positive interventions relating to those issues. Learners are encouraged to interact with each other through interactive discussions.

The course lasts for ten (10) weeks and it is taught in English. It is scheduled to start on April 13, 2024.

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See also: 10 Best BYU Free Online Courses With Certificates in 2024

#8. Probabilistic Graphical Models 3: Learning

Probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) are a rich framework for encoding probability distributions over complex domains: joint (multivariate) distributions over large numbers of random variables that interact with each other.

These representations sit at the intersection of statistics and computer science, relying on concepts from probability theory, graph algorithms, machine learning, and more.

They are the basis for the state-of-the-art methods in a wide variety of applications, such as medical diagnosis, image understanding, speech recognition, natural language processing, and many, many more. They are also a foundational tool in formulating many machine learning problems.

This course discusses the question of learning: how a PGM can be learned from a data set of examples. It also discusses the key problems of parameter estimation in both directed and undirected models, as well as the structure learning task for directed models. 

The free online course will last for five (5) weeks starting from April 20, 2024. English is the language of learning.

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#9. Social and Economic Networks: Models and Analysis

In this course, you’ll learn how to model social and economic networks and their impact on human behavior. How do networks form, why do they display certain patterns, and how do their structure impact diffusion, learning, and other behaviors.

Furthermore, you’ll learn models and techniques from economics, sociology, math, physics, statistics, and computer science to answer these questions.

The course begins with some empirical background on social and economic networks, and an overview of concepts used to describe and measure networks.

This 8 week-long course is scheduled to commence on April 20, 2024. English is the language of learning.

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#10. Intro to Statistics

Statistics is about obtaining meaning from data. In this class, you will learn techniques for visualizing relationships in data and systematic techniques for understanding the relationships using mathematics.

This course will cover visualization, probability, regression and other topics that will help you learn the basic methods of understanding data with statistics.

This self paced course is scheduled to last for eight (8) weeks.

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#11. Statistical Learning

This is an introductory-level course in administered learning, with a focus on regression and classification methods.

In this course you’ll learn linear and polynomial regression, logistic regression and linear discriminant analysis; cross-validation and the bootstrap, model selection and regularization methods (ridge and lasso); nonlinear models, splines and generalized additive models; tree-based methods, random forests and boosting; support-vector machines.

Some unsupervised learning methods are discussed: principal components and clustering (k-means and hierarchical).

This is a self paced course scheduled to last for nine (9) weeks.

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#12. Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a field that has a long history but is still constantly and actively growing and changing. In this course, you’ll learn the basics of modern AI as well as some of the representative applications of AI.

Along the way, we also hope to excite you about the numerous applications and huge possibilities in the field of AI, which continues to increase human capability beyond our imagination.

Also, you’ll learn the basics and applications of AI, including machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, robotics, computer vision, and natural language processing.

This self paced course is scheduled to last for sixteen (16) weeks. You can start now.

Start now

See also: Free Online Courses at Harvard University for All Students | 2024

#13. Programming Max: Structuring Interactive Software for Digital Arts

Max is a powerful platform that accommodates and connects a wide variety of tools for sound, graphics, music, and interactivity using a flexible patching and programming environment.

This platform allows most computer users to write a simple, meaningful program within a few minutes, even with limited programming knowledge.

In this class the following will be covered;

• sound and movie playback
• algorithmic composition
• sound synthesis
• sound and video effects processing
• cross-modal mappings (e.g., video affecting audio and vice versa)
• interactive control (e.g., from QWERTY keyboard, mouse, USB devices, Open Sound Control)

This course will largely focus on the deep aspects: principles, concepts, techniques, and theory. If you understand these underlying aspects, your capacity to create in Max will deepen exponentially.

This is a self paced course. Therefore, you can start anytime you feel like.

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#14. Understanding Einstein: The Special Theory of Relativity

This course will be focused on the special theory of relativity that Albert Einstein, as a twenty-six-year-old patent clerk, introduced in his “miracle year” of 1905.

It will go behind the myth-making and beyond the popularized presentations of relativity in order to gain a deeper understanding of both Einstein the person and the concepts, predictions, and strange paradoxes of his theory.

In this course, the following questions will be answered;

• How did Einstein come up with his ideas?  
• What was the nature of his genius?
• What is the meaning of relativity?
• What’s “special” about the special theory of relativity?
• Why did the theory initially seem to be dead on arrival?
• What does it mean to say that time is the “fourth dimension”?
• Can time actually run more slowly for one person than another, and the size of things change depending on their velocity?
• Is time travel possible, and if so, how?
• Why can’t things travel faster than the speed of light?
• Is it possible to travel to the center of the galaxy and return in one lifetime?
• Is there any evidence that definitively confirms the theory, or is it mainly speculation?
• Why didn’t Einstein win the Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity?

Summarily, there’s a whole lot to be learned in this course. Don’t be left out. This eight (8) week-long course will commence on April 27, 2024.

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#15. Principles of Computing

Principles of Computing teaches the essential ideas of Computer Science for a zero-prior-experience audience.

Computers can appear very complex, but in reality, computers work within just a few, simple designs. This course explains and brings those patterns to life, which is useful for anyone using computers today.

Participants play and experiment with short bits of “computer code” to bring to life the power and limitations of computers. Everything works within the browser, so there is no extra software to download or install.

The course also provides general background on computers today: what is a computer, what is hardware, what is software, what is the internet. No previous experience is required other than the ability to use a web browser.

This course is a self paced course.

Start now

Check this out: 15 Free Online Web Development Courses With Certificates In 2024

NOTE: You’ll get satisfied and certified at the end of each of these free online courses. Don’t miss this opportunity.

Benefits of Online Certificates

In as much as the importance placed on online certificate differs according to sectors and industries where it is applied, the advantages and knowledge gained in the process is golden. It gives you an edge where need be.

You should also note that a certificate of training is not the same as a certification of knowledge.

In a nutshell, the aim of the online course shouldn’t be just to get the certificate at the end of the course but to gain knowledge backed up with a certificate.

FAQs– Free Online Courses at Stanford University

Conclusion

You will agree with me that online learning has grown into a viable educational medium. Instead of the conventional offline courses taken in physical classrooms, people now resort to online courses from the comfort of their homes using their phones, laptops or tablets. Take advantage of this wonderful opportunity offered by Stanford University now. Good luck!!

References

• classcentral.com
• onlinestanford.edu

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