Yale free online courses with certificates: what is really on offer
No Yale course listed here gives you a free certificate. Only the Coursera courses have any certificate attached, and there it is a paid extra. Here is how each case works.
Coursera courses with an optional paid certificate
The Science of Well-Being and Moral Foundations of Politics are free in full on Coursera. Yale Online describes the free route as the whole course without a certificate, and the paid route as a certificate whose price varies by location. Financial aid is available on both. What you buy is a Coursera course certificate, not Yale credit or a degree.
Two Open Yale Courses lecture courses also have Coursera editions on the same terms: Financial Markets and Introduction to Psychology. The Coursera edition is free to take in full, and a certificate can be bought separately.
Courses with no certificate at all
Every Open Yale Courses lecture course, such as Death or Game Theory, carries a plain statement from Yale that no credit, degree or certificate is available through the site. The same applies to the YouTube lecture courses Listening to Music and Power and Politics in Today's World, which Yale Online labels open access, meaning no credential is awarded.
One Coursera course also awards nothing: The Making of Modern Ukraine. Its page states that no certificates, credentials or reports are given. If a certificate is essential, free online courses with certificates covers providers that issue one.
Yale free courses on Coursera versus Open Yale Courses
Open Yale Courses are complete semesters recorded in Yale classrooms, mostly between 2006 and 2011, and each course page says when it was taught. Every lecture comes as streaming video, downloadable video or audio and a searchable transcript, with the syllabus, reading list and the original problem sets or exams alongside. Nothing is graded and nothing needs an account.
The Coursera courses are built as modules on a flexible, self-paced schedule. The Science of Well-Being runs six modules with weekly practical exercises; Moral Foundations of Politics has eight modules and recorded office-hours sessions. Since Coursera replaced its audit option, most courses on the platform only preview the first module, so a Yale Coursera course appears here only when its page shows the whole course as free.
If you want structure and exercises, choose Coursera. If you want the full campus lecture with the readings and everything downloadable, choose Open Yale Courses.
How to start a Yale course for free
The steps depend on where the course lives; none involves paying.
- Open Yale Courses: open the course page, pick a lecture under Sessions, and stream or download it. No registration, no deadlines.
- Coursera: open the course page and choose the free option, which Yale Online describes as the full course with no certificate. Pay only if you later decide you want the certificate.
- YouTube: the open access courses are playlists on the Yale Courses channel; Listening to Music carries English subtitles.
- Check the recording date on Open Yale Courses: you are watching a specific semester as taught, not an updated edition.
The Yale happiness course: The Science of Well-Being
Laurie Santos's course is the one most people mean by Yale's happiness course. It grew out of her Yale class on psychology and the good life, and on Coursera it runs as six modules: an introduction, misconceptions about happiness, why our expectations are so poor, how to overcome biases, what really makes us happy, and putting strategies into practice.
Alongside the videos you get practical challenges, called rewirements, and you finish by building one wellness activity into your routine. The course is free; the shareable certificate is a separate purchase with location-based pricing, and financial aid is available. Yale also posts the videos on YouTube, and Coursera has a separate teen version. Related courses sit under free psychology courses.
What you can study with Yale for free
Most listed courses are humanities and social science lectures. No Yale course in computer science or programming is listed; the programming hub collects those from other providers.
Psychology, economics and game theory
Introduction to Psychology gives you Paul Bloom's twenty lectures on the brain, child development, language, memory and emotion. Financial Markets is Robert Shiller's twenty-three lectures on risk, stocks, real estate, banking and regulation. Game Theory runs twenty-four lectures from dominance to auctions and requires introductory microeconomics and some calculus. The last two sit in the business hub.
History and politics
For American history there are The American Revolution and The Civil War and Reconstruction Era. The Making of Modern Ukraine is labelled beginner level. It runs about 24 hours of video. Introduction to Political Philosophy reads Plato to Tocqueville, and Power and Politics in Today's World covers politics since the Cold War. It runs 33 hours. See also free history courses.
Literature, philosophy, science and law
Introduction to Theory of Literature maps twentieth-century criticism, and Dante in Translation reads the Divine Comedy canto by canto with no Italian needed. Death is Shelly Kagan's argument-by-argument philosophy course, and Listening to Music is for people who cannot read music. It runs 22 hours.
Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics covers exoplanets, black holes and dark energy. Frontiers of Biomedical Engineering is written for non-science majors too. Environmental Politics and Law teaches US environmental regulation through case histories and is Yale's only entry in the law hub.