Are you looking for top online courses in 2020? Here is the list of 20 Popular Coursera Courses that are fully accessible without payment. You can join these courses for free but if you want a verified certificate then you need to pay for it. If you can’t afford to pay for a certificate, apply for Coursera Financial Aid to get a certificate for free. (Watch the video at the end of this article for financial aid process)
Anyone from any part of the world can apply for the Coursera Online Courses. Coursera offers both free and paid courses. It is one of the most comprehensive e-learning platforms courses in a variety of subjects with an option to audit the course for free.
Coursera is an American online learning platform founded in 2012 by Stanford professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller that offers massive open online courses, specializations, and degrees.
20 Popular Coursera Courses in 2020:
Here is the list of the most popular Coursera courses that are available for free on Coursera.
1) The Science of Well-Being
In this course, you will engage in a series of challenges designed to increase your own happiness and build more productive habits. As preparation for these tasks, Professor Laurie Santos reveals misconceptions about happiness, annoying features of the mind that lead us to think the way we do, and the research that can help us change. You will ultimately be prepared to successfully incorporate a specific wellness activity into your life.
Course Offered By: Yale University
Course Instructors: Laurie Santos, Professor
Course Rating: 4.9/5 Stars
No. of enrolled Students: 2,194,397
2) Machine Learning
Machine learning is the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. In the past decade, machine learning has given us self-driving cars, practical speech recognition, effective web search, and a vastly improved understanding of the human genome.
Machine learning is so pervasive today that you probably use it dozens of times a day without knowing it. Many researchers also think it is the best way to make progress towards human-level AI.
In this class, you will learn about the most effective machine learning techniques, and gain practice implementing them and getting them to work for yourself. More importantly, you’ll learn about not only the theoretical underpinnings of learning but also gain the practical know-how needed to quickly and powerfully apply these techniques to new problems. Finally, you’ll learn about some of Silicon Valley’s best practices in innovation as it pertains to machine learning and AI.
Course Offered By: Stanford University, USA
Course Instructors: Andrew Ng is Co-founder of Coursera and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University
Course Rating: 4.9/5 Stars
No. of enrolled Students: 3,056,321 already enrolled
3) Algorithms, Part I
This course covers the essential information that every serious programmer needs to know about algorithms and data structures, with emphasis on applications and scientific performance analysis of Java implementations. Part I covers elementary data structures, sorting, and searching algorithms. Part II focuses on graph- and string-processing algorithms.
Course Offered By: Princeton University, USA
Course Instructors: Senior Lecturer Kevin Wayne and Professor Robert Sedgewick
Course Rating: 4.9/5 Starts
No. of enrolled Students: 566,080
4) Science Matters: Let’s Talk About COVID-19
The outbreak of the Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) is the most significant public health emergency of the 21st century so far. As the epidemic spreads, people around the world want to understand the science behind the most pressing questions: how many people have been infected? How dangerous is the virus? When will a vaccine be available? How can the epidemic be contained, and the damages mitigated? What is the economic impact? What’s the role of social media and local communities in the epidemic response?
On this course, you will hear directly from our world-class experts about the theory behind the analyses of COVID-19 and its spread, while learning how to interpret new information using core principles of public health, epidemiology, medicine, health economics, and social science. You will be able to watch regular situation reports about the state of the epidemic, provided by the researchers of J-IDEA and its director Professor Neil Ferguson.
Course Offered By: Imperial College London
Course Instructors: Helen Ward Professor of Public Health, Oliver Geffen Obregon Epidemiology Teaching Fellow, Katharina Hauck Deputy Director of J-IDEA and Reader in Health Economic
Course Rating: 3.9/5 Stars
No. of enrolled Students: 103,524
5) Financial Markets
An overview of the ideas, methods, and institutions that permit human society to manage risks and foster enterprise. Emphasis on financially-savvy leadership skills. Description of practices today and analysis of prospects for the future. Introduction to risk management and behavioral finance principles to understand the real-world functioning of securities, insurance, and banking industries. The ultimate goal of this course is to use such industries effectively and towards a better society.
Course Offered by: Yale University, USA
Course Instructors: Professor Robert Shiller
Rating: 4.8/5 stars
Number of students enrolled: 375,045
6) Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects
This course gives you easy access to the invaluable learning techniques used by experts in art, music, literature, math, science, sports, and many other disciplines. We’ll learn about how the brain uses two very different learning modes and how it encapsulates (“chunks”) information. We’ll also cover illusions of learning, memory techniques, dealing with procrastination, and best practices shown by research to be most effective in helping you master tough subjects.
Using these approaches, no matter what your skill levels in topics you would like to master, you can change your thinking and change your life. If you’re already an expert, this peep under the mental hood will give you ideas for turbocharging successful learning, including counter-intuitive test-taking tips and insights that will help you make the best use of your time on homework and problem sets. If you’re struggling, you’ll see a structured treasure trove of practical techniques that walk you through what you need to do to get on track. If you’ve ever wanted to become better at anything, this course will help serve as your guide.
Course Offered By: McMaster University, Canada | University of California San Diego, US
Course Instructors: Professor Barbara Oakley and Professor Terrence Sejnowsk
Course Rating: 4.8/5 Starts
No. of enrolled Students: 2,129,105
7) Successful Negotiation: Essential Strategies and Skills
We all negotiate on a daily basis. On a personal level, we negotiate with friends, family, landlords, car sellers, and employers, among others. Negotiation is also the key to business success. No business can survive without profitable contracts. Within a company, negotiation skills can lead to your career advancement.
Course Offered By: University of Michigan, USA
Course Instructors: Professor George Siedel
Course Rating: 4.8/5 Stars
No. of enrolled Students: 692,322
8) English for Career Development
English for Career Development, a course created by the University of Pennsylvania, and funded by the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Office of English Language Programs.
This course is designed for non-native English speakers who are interested in advancing their careers in the global marketplace. In this course, you will learn about the job search, application, and interview process in the United States, while comparing and contrasting the same process in your home country. This course will also give you the opportunity to explore your global career path while building your vocabulary and improving your language skills to achieve your professional goals.
Course Offered By: University of Pennsylvania, USA
Course Instructors: Brian McManus, Language Specialist | Robyn Turner, Senior Language Specialist
Course Rating: 4.8/Stars
No. of enrolled Students: 659,099
9) Financial Engineering and Risk Management Part I
Financial Engineering is a multidisciplinary field drawing from finance and economics, mathematics, statistics, engineering, and computational methods. The emphasis of FE & RM Part I will be on the use of simple stochastic models to price derivative securities in various asset classes including equities, fixed income, credit, and mortgage-backed securities. We will also consider the role that some of these asset classes played during the financial crisis. A notable feature of this course will be an interview module with Emanuel Derman, the renowned “quant” and best-selling author of “My Life as a Quant”.
Course Offered By: Columbia University, USA
Course Instructors: Professor Martin Haugh and Professor Garud Iyenga
Course Rating: 4.6/5 Stars
No. of enrolled Students: 310,709
10) Seeing Through Photographs
Although taking, sharing, and viewing photographs has become second nature for many of us, our regular engagement with images does not necessarily make us visually literate.
This course aims to address the gap between seeing and truly understanding photographs by introducing a diversity of ideas, approaches, and technologies that inform their making.
In this course you will look closely at photographs from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art and hear a variety of perspectives on what a photograph is and the ways that photography has been used throughout its nearly 180-year history: as a means of artistic expression, as a tool for science and exploration; as an instrument of documentation; to tell stories and record histories, and as a mode of communication and critique in our ever-increasingly visual culture
Course Offered By: The Museum of Modern Art, USA
Course Instructors: Sarah Meister, Curator
Course Rating: 4.8 Stars
No. of enrolled Students: 314,551
11) Management of Fashion and Luxury Companies
earn how fashion and luxury companies work and understand their brands, products, retail, and communication strategies. Travel through business models, international development, and product categories with industry influent experts.
Adopting a case-study approach, the course presents strategic brand management in luxury and fashion companies as a balancing act: tradition vs. innovation, expertise vs. experimentation, casual vs. stylish; in order to increase the brand value by nurturing the brand heritage and at the same time staying fresh, relevant, and contemporary in the global marketplace.
Topics such as the impact of new retail channels, new media channels, and new business declinations for the brand and emerging markets will be discussed in the course.
Course Offered By: Università Bocconi, Itlay
Course Instructors: Professor Stefania Saviolo and Professor Erica Corbellini
Course Rating: 4.7/5 Stars
No. of enrolled Students: 111,000 already enrolled
12) Private Equity and Venture Capital
The course deals with the analysis of private equity and venture capital business.
Over the course, students will be provided with a deep understanding of the mechanism underpinning the creation and/or development of a firm and the financial support it can get from the financial system through venture capital investment.
The course tries to discover how special financial intermediaries (called private equity investors) finance through equity companies belonging to different stages of their life-cycle, starting from the very beginning (startup and early-stage) to a more mature phase (i.e. expansion, mature age, etc.) or also staying into crises and decline.
Course Offered By: Università Bocconi, Itlay
Course Instructors: Stefano Caselli, Vice Rector for International Affairs
Course Rating: 4.8/5 Stars
No. of enrolled Students: 72,966
13) Learn to Program: The Fundamentals
Behind every mouse click and touch-screen tap, there is a computer program that makes things happen. This course introduces the fundamental building blocks of programming and teaches you how to write fun and useful programs using the Python language.
Course Offered By: University of Toronto, Canada
Course Instructors: Senior Lecture Jennifer Campbell and Senior Lecture Paul Gries
Course Rating: 4.8/5 Stars
No. of enrolled Students: 170,391
14) Internet History, Technology, and Security
The impact of technology and networks on our lives, culture, and society continues to increase. The very fact that you can take this course from anywhere in the world requires a technological infrastructure that was designed, engineered, and built over the past sixty years. To function in an information-centric world, we need to understand the workings of network technology. This course will open up the Internet and show you how it was created, who created it and how it works. Along the way we will meet many of the innovators who developed the Internet and Web technologies that we use today.
After this course, you will not take the Internet and Web for granted. You will be better informed about important technological issues currently facing society. You will realize that the Internet and Web are spaces for innovation and you will get a better understanding of how you might fit into that innovation. If you get excited about the material in this course, it is a great lead-in to taking a course in Web design, Web development, programming, or even network administration. At a minimum, you will be a much wiser network citizen.
Course Offered By: University of Michigan, USA
Course Instructors: Charles Russell Severance, Clinical Professor
Course Rating: 4.8/5 Stars
No. of enrolled Students: 107,064
15) Introduction to Philosophy
This course will introduce you to some of the main areas of research in contemporary philosophy. Each module a different philosopher will talk you through some of the most important questions and issues in their area of expertise. We’ll begin by trying to understand what philosophy is – what are its characteristic aims and methods, and how does it differ from other subjects? Then we’ll spend the rest of the course gaining an introductory overview of several different areas of philosophy.
Course Offered By: The University of Edinburgh
Course Instructors: Lecture Dr. Dave Ward, Professor Duncan Pritchard, Professor Michela Massimi, Lecture Dr. Suilin Lavelle, Dr. Matthew Chrisman, Dr. Allan Hazlett, Dr. Alasdair Richmond, Lecture Guy Fletcher, Senior Elinor Mason
Course Rating: 4.6/5 Stars
No. of enrolled Students: 346,812
16) Cryptography I
Cryptography is an indispensable tool for protecting information in computer systems. In this course, you will learn the inner workings of cryptographic systems and how to correctly use them in real-world applications.
The course begins with a detailed discussion of how two parties who have a shared secret key can communicate securely when a powerful adversary eavesdrops and tampers with traffic. We will examine many deployed protocols and analyze mistakes in existing systems. The second half of the course discusses public-key techniques that let two parties generate a shared secret key.
Throughout the course, participants will be exposed to many exciting open problems in the field and work on fun (optional) programming projects. In a second course (Crypto II) we will cover more advanced cryptographic tasks such as zero-knowledge, privacy mechanisms, and other forms of encryption.
Course Offered By: Stanford University, USA
Course Instructors: Professor Dan Boneh
Course Rating: 4.8/5 Stars
No. of enrolled Students: 252,008
17) Buddhism and Modern Psychology
This course will examine how Buddhism is faring under this scrutiny. Are neuroscientists starting to understand how meditation “works”? Would such an understanding validate meditation—or might physical explanations of meditation undermine the spiritual significance attributed to it? And how are some of the basic Buddhist claims about the human mind holding up? We’ll pay special attention to some highly counterintuitive doctrines: that the self doesn’t exist, and that much of perceived reality is in some sense illusory. Do these claims, radical as they sound, make a certain kind of sense in light of modern psychology? And what are the implications of all this for how we should live our lives? Can meditation make us not just happier, but better people?
Course Offered By: Princeton University, USA
Course Instructors: Robert Wright, Visiting Lecturer
Course Rating: 4.8/5 Stars
No. of enrolled Students: 389,836
18) Fighting COVID-19 with Epidemiology: A Johns Hopkins Teach-Out
This free Teach-Out is for anyone who has been curious about how we identify and measure outbreaks like the COVID-19 epidemic and wants to understand the epidemiology of these infections.
The COVID-19 epidemic has made many people want to understand the science behind pressing questions like: “How many people have been infected?” “How do we measure who is infected?” “How infectious is the virus?” “What can we do?” Epidemiology has the tools to tell us how to collect and analyze the right data to answer these questions. In addition to a basic understanding of these essential tools, this Teach-Out provides a way for you to learn and connect with one another while continuing to practice the social distancing measures that will help keep us safe. We also hope to provide you with some tangible calls to action that will help you affect positive change for yourself, your community, and our society.
Course Offered By: Johns Hopkins University, USA
Course Instructors: Robert Wright, Visiting Lecturer
Course Rating: 4.6/5 Stars
No. of enrolled Students: 71,171
19) AI For Everyone
AI is not only for engineers. If you want your organization to become better at using AI, this is the course to tell everyone–especially your non-technical colleagues–to take.
In this course, you will learn: –
- The meaning behind common AI terminology, including neural networks, machine learning, deep learning, and data science
- What AI realistically can–and can not–do
- How to spot opportunities to apply AI to problems in your own organization
- What it feels like to build machine learning and data science projects
- How to work with an AI team and build an AI strategy in your company
- How to navigate ethical and societal discussions surrounding AI
Though this course is largely non-technical, engineers can also take this course to learn the business aspects of AI.
Course Offered By: deeplearning.ai
Course Instructors: Andrew Ng is Co-founder of Coursera and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University
Course Rating: 4.8/5 Stars
No. of enrolled Students: 283,736
20) Introduction to Financial Accounting
Master the technical skills needed to analyze financial statements and disclosures for use in financial analysis, and learn how accounting standards and managerial incentives affect the financial reporting process. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to read the three most common financial statements: the income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows. Then you can apply these skills to a real-world business challenge as part of the Wharton Business Foundations Specialization.
Course Offered By: The University of Pennsylvania, USA
Course Instructors: Brian J Bushee, The Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor
Course Rating: 4.7/5 Stars
No. of enrolled Students: 193,810
Good Luck and enroll now in free Popular Coursera Courses.
