About Open Course Space
Universities around the world publish thousands of free courses: recorded lecture series, open courseware and free online courses. They're scattered across hundreds of websites in dozens of languages. Open Course Space gathers them into one searchable catalogue and sends you straight to the source.
What we list
Courses from universities and other degree-granting institutions, including national course platforms run by or for universities. Right now that's 6,319 courses from 208 institutions. We store only a description of each course and a link to it. The lectures, videos and materials stay on the university's own site.
What counts as free
Anyone must be able to reach the full lectures and course materials at no cost, with no time limit. Paid extras such as certificates, proctored exams or credit are allowed, and we label them. We leave out courses behind paywalls or subscriptions, courses whose free access expires, free trials, and previews.
- Free: Free, no sign-up needed.
- Free · sign-up: Free, with a free account.
- Free · paid certificate: Free to learn; certificate, exam or credit costs extra.
How it stays up to date
Every day an automated job checks each source that's due, from official course APIs to university course listings, then rebuilds this site. It runs entirely on GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages: no servers, no database, no tracking. Our crawler identifies itself, follows each site's robots.txt, and goes slowly. Read more for website owners.
When a source changes its website and our harvester breaks, the previous data is kept and we're alerted automatically, so courses don't silently disappear. Course links are re-checked weekly.
Subjects
Courses are classified with UNESCO's international fields of education (ISCED-F 2013) using each source's own categories plus keyword rules in several languages. Classification is automatic, so it can be wrong.Tell us when it is.
Open data
The whole catalogue can be downloaded and reused. Course descriptions belong to the institutions that wrote them and keep their original licences.
Help and contact
Know a free course or a university course site we're missing? Suggest a courseor suggest a source. See how to contribute, or write to hello@opencourse.space.