Are You Taking Advantage? Free Online Genealogical Education …

For all of you looking for a bargain genealogical education, you can’t get any better than free! In Free Online Genealogical Education, Part 1 I discussed the wealth of information online in the FamilySearch Learning Center, as well as through a variety of genealogical webinars. Now, in Part 2, we turn to a variety of free self-paced and instructor-led courses, focused both on genealogy, and related fields such as writing, DNA, and history.

Brigham Young University (BYU) offers a number of free family history courses through their nonprofit Independent Study department, including such courses as “Writing Family History,” “Helping Children Love Family History,” “Huguenot Research,” and “Military Records.”. The BYU Center for Family History and Genealogy hosts a number of helpful websites and tutorials, including Discovering English Ancestors created by David H. Pratt, PhD, Emeritus Professor of History and A. G. Emeritus; and Script Tutorials on reading old English, German, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese handwriting.

Another free online source from which any genealogist will benefit are the Evidence Explained QuickLessons developed by Elizabeth Shown Mills. In them she presents topics ranging from “What Constitutes Proof?” and “Chasing an Online Record into its Rabbit Hole,” to “Plagiarism” and “Family Lore and Indian Princesses.” These are individually written lessons or tutorials–not classes or webinars–but are packed with such valuable information that I learn something new with each one.

A number of major universities have joined forces to offer free open courses online — often referred to as MOOC (Massive Online Open Course). Coursera is one of the largest such providers, and offers a number of courses that may be of interest to genealogists including:

• Immigration U.S. Citizenship, Emory University
• English Common Law: Structures Principles, University of London
• Useful Genetics, The University of British Columbia
• The Camera Never Lies (the use of photographs as historical evidence), University of London
• Think Again: How to Reason and Argue, Duke University
• Introduction to Genetics Evolution, Duke University
• Women and the Civil Rights Movement, University of Maryland

The Coursera courses are instructor-led, and vary in length. Because these are in-person online courses, they start and end at a pre-set time, but most of the learning during that period can be done at times that are convenient to you; the general format includes recorded lectures, assignments, and group discussion. Some courses are graded, with an available certificate or statement of accomplishment. The options for each course vary by instructor and university.

Canvas Network, by Instructure, is another open, online learning network with a variety of free online courses. Of course, many of them are pretty far removed from genealogy (Algebra?), but you can find a few interesting gems such as Writing History, from the University of Central Florida. New courses are added regularly, so keep this one in your Bookmarks folder.

Have a blog-based website and want to take it further? Another MOOC vendor, Udacity, has a neat Web Development course focused on building your own blog application. Warning – this is a developer-level course geared toward blog application development, not one focused on starting your own blog.

Some individual universities offer their own online open courseware as well. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was one of the first, with a huge collection of education materials representing many of its past undergraduate and graduate courses. The math is getting harder (Multivariable Calculus and Differential Equations), but again you can find a number of non-technical courses in departments such as History and Languages. OpenCourseWare is self-paced,  allowing you to learn via recorded lectures, handouts, and other course materials — and complete as much or as little as you like. Yale Open Courses offers free, open access to a variety of introductory courses from Yale University, where you can explore such topics as the American Revolution, Epidemics in Western Society, the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction Era, and Modern France. The Open Learning Initiative at my alma-mater Carnegie Mellon offers a few that interest me, such as Logic Proof (takes me back to my undergrad days in Cognitive Science) and Elementary French (I’ve taught myself to read basic French, but can’t speak it).

You can find even more free university courses online through search engines such as OCWSearch, dedicated to helping you find online OpenCourseWare initiatives. The engine includes courses from universities worldwide, including Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Delft University of Technology, and the University of Tokyo. Course Buffet lists “more than 500 courses from various MOOC providers, including Saylor.org, OpenCourseWare Consortium, Coursera, Udacity, Venture Lab and edX.” Class Central aggregates MOOC options from Coursera, Udacity, edX, Canvas Network and other MOOC providers, categorizing courses as “in progress,” “just announced,” “self-paced,” and “future courses.”

There are definitely other great free online learning opportunities. Please feel free to share your favorites in the comments.

Happy learning!

Learn more about upcoming genealogical education opportunities (both free and tuition) on Angela McGhie’s blog:
Adventures in Genealogical Education 

Learn More from About.com Distance Learning:
Top Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
The Best OpenCourseWare Collections