If you need help launching a business or bolstering your entrepreneurial skills, access free online courses from leading universities and industry experts.
Here is a list of free online courses for entrepreneurs. There are courses on how to launch a business, and a variety of others to work on essential skills, such as effective writing and pitching.
Free Online Courses for Entrepreneurs
Building a Business. This is a series of eight lectures on YouTube from the University of Oxford. Learn the essential steps to start a business, market the business, and sell products, protect ideas, raise capital, and formulate financial projections.
Branding, Content, and Social Media. Learn to focus your energies where branding, social media, and compelling content intersect. Examine how they overlap and complement each other, then consider traditional communication tools, such as audience segmentation, messaging, communication strategy, and evaluation.
Writing for Strategic Communication. From tweeting to speechwriting, this course provides an overview of various forms of professional writing, including traditional media, web, and social media. Students are encouraged to explore great writing to understand the power of words and to develop their own writing.
The Elevator Pitch. In a tweet-driven society — 140 characters or less — how do you capture attention meaningfully and authentically? Chris Van Dusen, writer and speaker for entrepreneurs and startups, will help you identify and formulate the most succinct and relevant elevator pitch for your business.
Entrepreneurship & Business. This audio course is by Mark Juliano, an entrepreneur who has started roughly 10 companies. The course parallels a live class at Carnegie Mellon University taught in the Masters in Information Systems Management program. Topics include idea generation, company formation, funding, writing a business plan, sales and marketing, IPOs and acquisitions, and giving an investor presentation. Get PowerPoint lecture notes, handouts, cases, and more at Talkshoe.com/professorjuliano.
Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies. This course assists aspiring and active entrepreneurs in developing great ideas into great companies. Identify and analyze entrepreneurial opportunities, enhance your entrepreneurial mindset, improve your strategic decision-making, and build innovative business models. Students experience a sampling of the ideas and techniques explored in the University of Maryland’s Masters in Technology Entrepreneurship.
How to Launch a Successful Startup Company. Bill Aulet, author and senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, talks about his 24-step process to launching a successful startup, providing a glance at what students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology are learning about entrepreneurship and innovation. Learn about key steps to launching a successful startup, and understand the importance of discipline, experimentation, iteration, and customer focus in the entrepreneurial process.
Entrepreneurship 101: Who is Your Customer? Turn your idea into a business as you learn the essential skills needed to identify and target customers. Entrepreneurship 101 prepares you for the MIT Global Entrepreneurship Bootcamp, a one-week, intensive entrepreneurship education program that challenges you to start a company in five days.
Entrepreneurship 102: Do You Have A Product? Learn how to create a product or service that meets your customers’ needs and identify the value proposition that sets you apart from the competition. This is another course to prepare you for the MIT Global Entrepreneurship Bootcamp. The Bootcamp offers the opportunity to be mentored by MIT faculty and MIT alumni entrepreneurs and investors as you begin your new entrepreneurial journey.
Becoming an Entrepreneur. Learn the business skills and startup mindset needed to embark on your entrepreneurial path from MIT Launch, MIT’s premier program for aspiring entrepreneurs. Learn to overcome the hurdles to starting a company. Perform market research to find your customer, define your goals, and develop your entrepreneurial strategy.
Entrepreneurship Through the Lens of Venture Capital. While there is no set formula for building a great company, basic principles and general patterns are manifested in the most successful startups. With over a century and a half of venture capital experience, the Stanford teaching team and guest lecturers cover the fundamentals for building a successful company.
Building a Business: Moving Your Product to the Market. This podcast series records a conference at Begbroke Science Park, University of Oxford, England. The series of seminars is held to encourage and support young science-based high-tech companies from their decision to spin out a research idea to the point at which they take their product to market. Its emphasis is on practical and useful advice from industry experts and world-renowned Oxford University academics.
Video Production. If you start on online business, you may need to know the ins and outs of video production, for product videos, tutorials, and presentations. This course will teach you the basics of setting up and running a video production for a variety of program forms.
Make a Website. Learn to build websites using web development fundamentals, including HTML5, CSS3, and Bootstrap. You’ll learn to understand and modify the structure of basic website, as well as how to change the way a page looks and is laid out. This is a starter course to learn to code through Codecademy.
Conducting a Thorough Market Assessment. The environment for launching a startup has improved drastically. Costs are lower, money is easier, and there exists a supportive social environment for savvy entrepreneurs. Conduct an assessment of market opportunity, and learn to create and launch your lean startup.
