April 2020 Free Online Courses

by jplaforest | Apr 10, 2020 | Education

One of the upsides to this COVID-19 Pandemic is the number of Free Online Courses and discounted educational offers available. Here is my list of recommended online sites.

Free Courses and Certifications for Business Intelligence and Analytics

• Efficient Analyst offers some great Excel and MicroStrategy tutorials, always free! https://efficientanalyst.com/
• Microsoft on-demand courses are available for free, instructor-lead courses and certifications still are full price: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/
  • Microsoft offers courses on most of their technology, including their Azure cloud, Power BI, and Office 365.
• MicroStrategy online courses (both on-demand and instructor-lead) and certification exams are free for April: https://www.microstrategy.com/us/free-education
  • MicroStrategy is one of the leading Business Intelligence tools, offering a very strong front-end tool for federated enterprise data warehouses, as well as a free Desktop version with the same dossier editing capabilities.
• Pluralsight offers free courses for April: https://www.pluralsight.com/
  • Pluralsight offers courses for data professionals, software development, IT, and Security.
• Tableau offers 90 days of free elearning if you use the access code 2020elearning at https://www.tableau.com/learn/training/elearning
  • Tableau is a popular Business Intelligence tool which is known for it’s custom visualizations and data exploration.
• Teradata offers many free courses and certifications: https://learning-center.teradata.com/Saba/Web_spf/NA7P1PRD070/guest/guestlearningcatalog
  • Teradata is a leading platform for Enterprise DataWarehouses, which has been providing performance at scale since the 1990s. They became famous for handling over 1 terabyte of Walmart’s data in 1992, and Ebay’s 10 Petabyte database back in 2010.

General Free Courses and Certifications

• EdX offers many free courses where you only pay if you want to take the exam and receive a certificate: https://www.edx.org/
  • I took some great EdX courses from well-known universities, from Harvard’s CS50, to courses from MIT, Boston University, and ETH Zürich. All courses are available for free, or you can pay for the ability to take the tests and receive a certificate. This is my go-to source of academic courses.
• Khan Academy offers free school courses: https://www.khanacademy.org/
  • Khan Academy is a great companion for K-12 students, with great content for all school courses, from pre-school all the way to AP courses and SAT test prep.
• Lynda.com offers 1 month free when you register: https://www.lynda.com/
  • Lynda.com has a great variety of courses, but where I find they excel is for Adobe Creative Cloud courses, such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, etc. If you are in a creative field, I highly recommend you check this out.
• Linked In Learning offers 1 month free when you register: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/
  • Linked In Learning has some interesting courses for advancing your career, as well as many business and software courses.

Discounted Offers:

• DataCamp offers 62% off their one year membership: https://www.datacamp.com/promo/april-2020/
  • DataCamp offers some great courses for learning SQL, Python, and R. One of their innovative features is the use of guided hands-on exercises in their simulator environment.
• Coursera offers many discounted courses: https://www.coursera.org/
  • Coursera offers some great university courses at a discount.
• Udemy offers many discounted courses: https://www.udemy.com/
  • While EdX and Coursera focus on University courses, Udemy courses are mostly created by their users, which means that some courses are excellent, and others are not as good, so it’s good to always read the reviews for each course.

Discounts for Students Only:

• Coursera offers free courses for university students of universities impacted by COVID-19: https://www.coursera.org/coronavirus
  • If you are a university student and your university was impacted by COVID-19, here’s a chance to get some great courses for free!