Princeton Online is the home for open courses offered through Princeton University's initiative in online education. The non-credit, open courses listed here are available for free to anyone with an internet connection. Since 2012, more than three million people have taken one of our MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). 

We offer courses on the Coursera, edX, and Kadenze platforms. For more information about where you can enroll in a particular course, look at the course descriptions under the Courses tab.

An online course is a web-based course that you can access through your computer, your cell phone or other mobile devices. Our courses consist of video lectures, assignments, and online discussions, but beyond that, they vary greatly in terms of content, length, and level of difficulty. 

It depends. Some of our courses are self-paced, which means that they are offered continuously and have no specific end date. You can work through these courses at your own pace. Some of our courses are session-based, which means that they have a specific beginning and end dates. Our Coursera courses are always session-based, but you never have to wait more than a couple of weeks for a new session to open. Finally, some of our courses are archived, which means you can access course material but the course is not active. 

You will find a list of our current courses under the Courses tab. 

No certificates, statements of accomplishment, or other credentials are offered in connection with our open, online courses. Enrollment in our open courses does not affirm that a learner is enrolled as a student at Princeton and does not confer a Princeton University grade, course credit or degree.

As part of the University's initiative in online education, our open course offerings support several goals:

• to make higher education accessible for professional development and lifelong learning for people around the world
• to enrich education at Princeton by opening campus courses to the diverse perspectives of learners worldwide 
• to provide faculty and colleagues in other institutions with material for research that can promote innovative teaching and learning
• to allow faculty to experiment with new teaching formats and learn from creating learning experiences at a worldwide scale
• to allow faculty to improve the scope and impact of their teaching