Free online English courses with certificates: what the listed courses offer
Of the 16 courses on this page, the free certificates come from freeCodeCamp, the optional paid certificates from Coursera and Alison, the verified certificates behind an audit track from Berkeley and Harvard on edX, and no certificate at all from Khan Academy, Udemy, Oxford and Open Yale Courses.
Free certificate: English for Developers on freeCodeCamp
A2 English for Developers Certification (Beta) and B1 English for Developers Certification (Beta) are the only listed English courses whose certificate is free and verifiable, published at a public URL on freecodecamp.org. Both are built from short workplace dialogues, each followed by a quiz, and aligned with the A2 and B1 levels of the Common European Framework. The A2 course covers greetings, introductions in an online meeting, describing your workday and background, then programming vocabulary, GitHub troubleshooting, stand-up meetings and code documentation. The B1 course moves into the Present Perfect, conditionals, modal verbs, reported speech, giving feedback, disagreeing and clarifying misunderstandings. The vocabulary stays close to software work, and both are marked Beta.
Free course, optional paid certificate: Coursera and Alison
English for Career Development, created by the University of Pennsylvania with U.S. Department of State funding, and Lund University's Writing in English at University both carry Coursera's free flag, so the whole course can be completed without paying; the shareable certificate is a paid option whose price Coursera does not state, and financial aid is listed. Alison's Diploma in Basic English Grammar is free to study in full, and the Alison Diploma at the end is a paid digital or printed purchase; a free Learner Record can be downloaded instead.
Free audit, paid verified certificate: Berkeley and Harvard on edX
Berkeley's How to Write an Essay and Academic and Business Writing can be audited free for as long as the run is active, without graded work; the verified certificate costs $169 and $199 respectively. Harvard's Rhetoric: The Art of Persuasive Writing and Public Speaking and Structure and Function of Argument: Introduction to Critical Thinking follow the same model at $209 each.
Learn English online free as a second language: courses by level
The courses written for language learners state a level or a prerequisite.
English courses for beginners
The Diploma in Basic English Grammar is rated Beginner Level and works through parts of speech, sentence structure, present and past tenses, the passive and punctuation, with video modules and assessments; it is available in English and Spanish. Udemy's FREE English Grammar Course covers the parts of speech and the most important verbs in 2 hours, but the lectures are in English only, so you need at least a beginner level to follow. The A2 English for Developers course is the entry point if you work in software.
Intermediate and academic English
English for Career Development walks non-native speakers through the job search as it happens in the United States: identifying roles, writing a resume and a cover letter, networking and interviewing, over four weeks at 10 hours a week. Writing in English at University, aimed especially at second-language writers, covers academic conventions, structuring an argument, citing sources and editing over three weeks, with a free electronic textbook. Berkeley's How to Write an Essay asks only for enough English to follow an introductory university course and runs five weeks at 5 to 6 hours a week; Academic and Business Writing, from the same instructor, continues into persuasive and workplace writing.
Free online English courses for adults who already speak it
For fluent speakers the choice is grammar, argument or literature. Khan Academy's Grammar overview takes each part of speech in turn, then punctuation, sentences and clauses, and usage and style, with practice and a unit test per unit and no stated duration, so it doubles as a reference for one rule at a time. Harvard's Rhetoric course analyses twentieth-century American speeches and has you write a persuasive opinion editorial and a short speech, over eight weeks at 2 to 3 hours a week; Structure and Function of Argument teaches you to map everyday arguments, judge whether the reasons support the claim, and disagree respectfully.
The literature courses are lecture-led. Shakespeare's Hamlet: The Ghost uses one figure to open up the whole play over four weeks; Masterpieces of World Literature reads from Gilgamesh and the Odyssey to Borges, Pamuk and Lahiri over twelve weeks. Oxford's Approaching Shakespeare is an audio series with one play per episode, listenable in any order, and Open Yale Courses publishes Introduction to Theory of Literature and Dante in Translation as full lecture runs with transcripts. Neither Oxford nor Yale issues a certificate.
Do the listed courses prepare you for IELTS or TOEFL
No listed course is exam preparation. The only record that mentions the exams is Udemy's grammar course, whose instructor lists IELTS and TOEFL candidates among the intended audience alongside general learners; it teaches parts of speech and verbs, not exam format or timing. The academic writing courses from Lund and Berkeley build the writing skills those exams test, but they do not name the exams.
Related pages
Courses aimed at composition and editing, including the Berkeley, Lund and Harvard writing courses above, are also listed on the free online writing courses hub, and the free online languages courses hub lists language courses more broadly, English included. For how freeCodeCamp's certifications work and what they are worth, read the freeCodeCamp provider page and Is a freeCodeCamp certificate worth it?.