Were you hit hard by the pandemic and feel unproductive these days? Invest your time and effort in learning skills from the best free short courses online you should take today.
You will learn from these courses in-demand skills that could help you earn extra income from doing project-based remote jobs. In addition, there is a good chance for you may land to get a full-time remote job with the new in-demand skills today. With that in mind, is it exciting to imagine your new lifestyle? Working from anywhere? Perhaps while traveling?
Above all, some of these free courses come with printable certificates too!
While platforms say “free courses with printable certificates”, be mindful that it is not always the case.
Some providers hide the certification behind a paywall. After you completed the “free short courses”, they will offer you to buy a certificate. The digital certificate generally costs between $20 to $300, depending on the service offered by the provider. It can be emailed to you or you access it from your account and download it anytime.
The Best Free Short Courses For You
To help you learn during these post-pandemic times, here are the most rated and trending Free Short Courses from top e-learning platforms. Yes, you got it right, it is free. Zero cost, at all.
In fact, there are more than 20,000 students who have completed the courses listed below. The content of the courses is suitable for all levels. In addition to that, it can be completed on your own schedule. What makes it more interesting is that the creators or authors of these courses are certified experts and instructors from known universities.
1. Introduction To Graphic Design
You will learn from this course about many different graphic design skills that will prove useful in real-word projects like Logo Design or Business Card Design.
It includes 5 starter projects such as Logo Design, Twitter Post Design, Tumble Banner Design, Soundcloud Banner Design & LinkedIn Banner Design. Another 5 advanced projects about Instagram Post Design, Email Header Design, Gift Certificate Design, Poster Design & Facebook Post Design.
Instructor: Blackbrick
Time: 1hour and 33 minutes
2. Learn Photoshop for Design: 100% Practical Projects
If you are looking to develop your design skills, this course is for you.
This course aims you to develop a comprehensive Photoshop design skill through a Project-based approach. It teaches fundamentals of Photoshop functions, tools, and relevant information on requisite resources that may be necessary for your projects. At the end of the course, you will be able to design banners, posters, and flyers in Photoshop
To follow along in this course, students will need a mouse or graphic tablet and a computer.
Instructor: Albert Annan
Time: 51minutes
3. The Logo Design Process From Start To Finish
To learn the Logo Design Process From Start To Finish course, you will need Adobe Illustrator CS4, CS5, or CS6. You can download a demo from the Adobe website.
This course will cover a wide variety of topics including Client Interaction, Project Research, Building Your Logo, and Finalizing Your Logo.
This course will bring you to the process of work. It will start from knowing how to get clients, prepare logo design information sheet, mind mapping, sketching out ideas up to closing the project with your client.
Instructor: Stephen Looney
Time: 5 hours and 26 minutes
4. Adobe InDesign Made Easy. A Beginners Guide To InDesign
Would you like to learn to know how to use one of the powerful page layout and design program? Adobe InDesign Beginner’s guide is for you.
The course is equipped with video training tutorials that would teach you how to use Adobe InDesign CS5. It includes topics from setting up your workspace, to using grids, the new layers panel in CS5, working with text, paragraph formatting, creating and using styles, and combining text and objects.
Instructor: Infinite Skills
Time: 11 hours
5. Setting Up Adobe Illustrator CS6 CC For Maximum Productivity
This course will provide you an understanding of the interfaces. The content of this course is design to let students get comfortable using artboards, and learn to quickly render multiple versions of projects. Moreover you will learn to customize your workspace to show the tools and panels you use.
You will need to have Adobe Illustrator CS3, CS4, CS5, CS6, or CC ready with your PC or Mac.
Instructor: Douglas James Butner
Time: 1 hour and 21 minutes
While you are completing these short courses, there is also another way to earn. Check this:
6. Introduction to Cloud Computing
You will learn the definition and relevance of cloud computing as an IT Held Desk.
This course provides understanding about the fundamental elements of cloud computing, the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store and filter out the hype and focus on cloud value.
Instructor: Xavier Corbett
Time: 56 minutes
7. Fundamentals of Freshservice (IT helpdesk)
As an IT Help Desk, learning the functions and fundamentals of Freshservice is an edge skill.
This course will help you learn how to set up and use Freshservice as an administrator and able to set up the IT service desk solution to modernize IT and other business functions. Further, with your new skills, you will understand how to set up and customize an IT system that runs like clockwork according to your company’s needs.
Instructor: Freshworks Academy
Time: 44 minutes
8. Building An IT Technicians Toolbox
This course will walk through a guide on building a professional IT repair USB toolkit. With this toolkit, it will help you work more efficiently and speed up the time taken when working on Windows systems. Topics include Basic Forensics, System Tools, Networking, Driver Tools, Browsers, Loaders, Audio and Video, HelpFul Diagrams, Printers, Virus Removal, and Useful Tools.
IT Technicians Toolbox course is for those who understood the Windows Operating System and knows how to repair them.
Instructor: Dean O
Time: 1 hour and 53 minutes
9. Performance analysis and troubleshooting
This course offers a structured approach to performance analysis and troubleshooting. You learn about basic IP troubleshooting with analyzer tools. A Google Cloud Platform based course that will teach you all troubleshooting tools used to monitor and troubleshoot the AWS environment.
Instructor: Ugo Bellavance
Time: 47 minutes
10. Troubleshooting Website Connectivity in a Cloud Environment
Another Google Cloud Platform-based course that would teach you to troubleshoot website connectivity running in a cloud environment.
It provides you knowledge about IP troubleshooting using ping, traceroute, and advanced tools such as Wireshark and TCPDump analyzer tools, and the Stackdriver tool.
Instructor: Bobby Malik
Time: 48 minutes
11. Code Yourself! An Introduction to Programming
This course is about the fundamental principles of computing.
It will Walk you through from basic programming concepts, getting familiar with Scratch, how to use events in programs, how to incorporate visual and sound effects, to reusing codes. You will also about to learn the steps of software development to create a fun computer game and message broadcasting and concurrency.
Instructor: Areti Manataki and Inés Friss de Kereki
Time: 13 hours
12. C for Everyone: Programming Fundamentals
This is the course that will let you gain a foundation in C programming.
Parts of the course include the history of the C language, the first set of programming activities and continuation of functions, recursion, arrays, and pointers. It also includes topics about the flow of control, simple functions, and lexical elements and data types.
Instructor: Ira Pohl
Time: 22 hours
13. Learn to Program: The Fundamentals
A course that will introduce you to the fundamental building blocks of programming. The module includes an introduction to fundamental concepts in Python with variables, mathematical expressions, and functions, Booleans (logical values True and False), and teaches you how to how to use a debugger to watch a program execution.
Instructor: Jennifer Campbell and Paul Gries
Time: 25 hours
14. HTML, CSS, and Javascript for Web Developers
In this module you will learn Introduction to HTML5, Introduction to CSS3, Coding the Static Restaurant Site, and Introduction to JavaScript.
The lesson starts with instructional videos on how to set up your development environment to understanding Responsive Design using CSS code. You will also introduce to Twitter Bootstrap with its essential Grid System.
Instructor: Yaakov Chaikin
Time: 28 hours
15. Web Design for Everybody: Basics of Web Development & Coding Specialization
A specialization composed of a series of courses which include Introduction to HTML5, Introduction to CSS3, Interactivity with JavaScript, and Advanced Styling with Responsive Design.
In the end, you will gain skills in Web Development, Cascading Style Sheets (CCS), Html5, JavaScript, Responsive Web Design, Web Design, Web Accessibility, Style Sheets, Document Object Model (DOM), and Bootstrap (Front-End Framework)
Instructor: Charles Russell Severance and Colleen van Lent, Ph.D.
Time: 6 months to complete (4 hours/week)