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Course Report

[2024] 1200+ Free Computer Science Courses from World’s Top Universities

Combining leading university rankings to find the best computer science courses available online.

In this article, we’ve compiled 1200+ online courses offered by the 60 best universities in the world for studying computer science in 2024.

Manoel first built the list in 2020 using a data-driven approach that we have used each year, including 2024. You can find the methodology below. But if you’d rather go straight to the course list, click here.

Methodology

First, Manoel identified the leading world university rankings. Since we were interested in computer science specifically, he looked at their latest computer science rankings.

For the 2024 update, Suparn used the same sources and methodology to find the top 60 universities offering online computer science courses.

Here are the rankings used:

Then, we crawled and scraped each ranking.

Now that we had some data, we used Jupyter with Python to process it. We combined the three rankings into one by averaging the position of each university in each ranking. Then, we filtered out the universities that didn’t offer online courses, and limited the list to the top 60 institutions — the cream of the crop.

Top 10 CS universities: MIT, Stanford, CMU, Oxford, UC Berkley, Harvard, Tsinghua, NUS, ETH Zurich, NTU.
Combined ranking: top 10 universities for studying computer science in 2024

As you can see above, we found that the top three institutions are #1 MIT, #2 Stanford, and #3 Carnegie Mellon.

Finally, we used the Class Central database, with its 250K online courses, to find all the computer science courses offered by the universities in the ranking.

The end result is a list of 1200+ online courses offered by the 60 best universities in the world for studying computer science in 2024.

Stats

  • Enrollments range from 10 to over 13 million, with 20 courses exceeding 1 million enrollments
  • Altogether, they have over 110M enrollments, with an average of 155K enrollments
  • 1180 courses are in English, 39 Chinese, 15 Spanish, 13 Arabic, 12 French, 12 Korean, 7 Russian, 3 Portuguese, 3 German, 1 Dutch, and 1 Japanese
  • Together, they account for more than 78K reviews at Class Central, with an average of 216 reviews
  • Average rating: 4.07 out of 5.0
  • All these courses are free or can be audited for free
  • 240 courses are beginner level, 281 are intermediate level, and 70 are advanced level.

More Courses

The full list is split into subjects. Click on a subject below to go to the relevant section. With over 1200 courses to pick from, I hope you find something you like. But if these aren’t enough, check out Class Central’s catalog of 250K online courses or our thematic collections:

Subjects

Programming (267)

Computer Science (736)

Data Science (221)

Information Security (InfoSec) (62)

Manoel Cortes Mendez Profile Image

Manoel Cortes Mendez

Software engineer and online graduate student in computer science passionate about education, technology, and their intersection.
Suparn Patra Profile Image

Suparn Patra

Suparn developed an interest in MOOCs through a project he worked on during his MSc in Artificial Intelligence. He joined Class Central as a Full Stack Engineer.

Comments 4

  1. Ambreen Asif Qureshi

    I am an educationist since 1994 and am presently working as Director Quality Enhancement Cell at one of the private universities in Pakistan.

    I am pretty good at almost all MS Office applications, and an avid user of computers for daily professional work.

    However, I think post Covid-19, there will be lots of lay offs through the the world, and, God forbid, I may not be an exception considering my salary package and age.

    Therefore, I want to gain knowledge and brush up my qualifications which may help me in working online from Home. Can you please advise me what would match my experience (mainly University Administration and Quality Assurance in Higher Education) and qualifications (M.A. English).

    I want to remain gainfully employed. Please help me understand new technologies and equip myself for future.

    Reply
  2. XYG

    Very helpful list. Thanks very much!

    Reply
  3. Miria Cambie

    This is a wonderful resource. Thank you!

    Reply
    • Nasheema Fathali Shahbazi

      Ambreen, I would say input your above question into ChatGTP and the answer following will guide you as to what to study that will align with what you looking for.

      Also I want to say thank you so much for making this resource available for so many people. This is an excellent compilation. Hats off to you .

      Reply

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