Coursera has extended an offer it made earlier this year in response to the Covid-19 lockdown when universities in many parts of the world shut their campuses sent students home - free access to any of 3800 courses. The deadline to enroll is now September 30, 2020.

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Free Coursera for University Students is available to current undergraduate or graduate students with a verified college or university email address and provides free access to over 3,800 courses, 400 Specializations, and 11 Professional Certificates.

You might well be wondering, now I'm back at University why should I add to my workload.

There are plenty of answers to this, starting with:

• To get a fresh perspective on a subject you are already doing

Most Computer Science undergraduate degrees have obligatory courses on Algorithms, which is a core topic. Coursera has several Specializations in this area including the Data Structures and Algorithms Specialization, an 8-month program from UC San Diego and Higher School of Economics (HSE), one of Russia's top research universities. It is at Intermediate level so you need some programming experience before you join it.

• To study a course your university or college doesn't offer:

While Python is an increasingly popular language to learn, it isn't taught on some campuses. Coursera has the highly popular Python for Everybody Specialization  and Python 3 Programming Specialization, both from the University of Michigan.

• To help you to choose your options later in your studies:

Are you attracted to Artificial Intelligence? If so check out the Deep Learning Specialization taught by Andrew Ng or the Natural Language Specialization also from deeplearning.ai. There are options for finding out about Computer Vision - for a primer consider Introduction to Computer Vision with Watson and OpenCV offered by IBM and plenty more for Machine Learning (ML), including a Machine Learning Specialization from the University of Washington. If want to become a Data Scientist, consider the Data Mining Specialization from University of Illinois, and if you want to do it with an ML twist. how about the Machine Learning With Big Data from Coursera, part of its Big Data Specialization from UC San Diego.

• To do something completely different as light relief:

My recommendations include Mountains 101 and Dino 101 from the University of Alberta or The Science of Well-Being from Yale. Just type a keyword for your area of interest in the Coursera search bar and you should find something that suits.

To take advantage of this opportunity access you need to be a full-time or part-time student and sign up. Once you have joined. After you join the program, you’ll need to enroll in the Professional Certificate, Specialization or courses you want to follow. For any course you enroll in on or before September 30, 2020, you will continue to have free access for at least two months from the time of enrollment to complete them and if there are courses that you still want to complete after the deadline, you can apply for financial aid or continue to access all the materials and courses by auditing the course or, if you want longer term access and gain certificates for all the courses you do turn to Coursera Plus:

Similarly, if you are reading this thinking I wish I could take advantage of this but I'm no longer a student (or it's after September 30, 2020), Coursera Plus, which costs $399 per year for access to over 3,000 courses including most of those mentioned in this article, could be just the right fit.

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Free Coursera for University Students

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