If you’ve read our post from last week, you’ve got a few ideas for hobbies that you can pick up during quarantine. If you’re interested in learning a skill through a course, now is the time! Curious about where to start with courses? Amazon has started offering courses from many different subjects including nursing, programming, foreign languages and business essentials. There are even a few courses curated by Oprah Winfrey. Outside of that, you’re in luck with all the free platforms and courses available. We’ve collected top courses and listed them out so you can pick and choose what you want to learn!

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Wellness Courses

If you’re having trouble sleeping, Oprah and Deepak Chopra have put together a course to help guide you to better sleep. It’s called the Oprah & Deepak’s Guide to Whole Health: 7 Days to Restful Sleep. Another course accompanying it is their course 21 Day Meditation Challenge: Perfect Health.

One of the most popular classes at Yale is now available on Coursera. It’s free to audit and is called The Science of Well-Being.

Math & Science Courses

Learn chemistry basics with this course from McGraw-Hill Education. Or if you’ve wanted to practice chess but don’t know how, you can sign up for a Zoom Chess subscription to learn, practice, and play.

Considering computer science as a new career? Harvard has a free 11-week CS50 course to take you through programming basics. Or if you’re interested in sustainability, you can take this interesting course on sustainable tourism.

Art & Design Courses

This complete InDesign course will give you the tools you need to design efficiently on InDesign CS5. Want something more basic? How about this free graphic design basics course.

If you’ve seen urban sketches and wondered how to recreate them, this beginner’s urban sketching class is perfect.

Business & Communication Courses

Want to sharpen your people skills while stuck at home? This course on Amazon helps guide you through it. Those thinking about starting up their own podcast will be interested in this beginner’s free podcast course by John Lee Dumas.

If you’re starting your own business, you know that finances are extremely important. This free course on financial accounting is designed to help alleviate your fears of finance. Once you’re ready to start investing money, you might want to check out this personal finance and investment course.

Language & Humanities Courses

Rosetta Stone is offering three months of free classes for students. If you’re interested in taking a language course but aren’t a student, you can trial Rosetta Stone for a week for free.

You can also learn about one of the first operas that was ever written, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, through this 3-week Harvard course.


Starting a course is easy, but pushing through to the end is the hard part. An easy way to stay motivated is by inviting someone else on the journey with you as an accountability partner. When you have a friend also working through a class, it gets easier to stay on course. Did you try out any of these courses? Let us know in the comments section!