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NextGenU.org offers free courses, certificates, and curricula across the health sciences, including offering to our institutional partners the world’s first free full curriculum for a Master’s Degree in Public Health! We also offer reading materials for a 4-year MedSchoolInABox, materials for a Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing curriculum with our partners at Nurses International, and Graduate Medical Education (in Preventive Medicine). NextGenU.org now has registrants in every country, is the beneficiary of a long-term grant and our funders and partners include CDC, Harvard, NATO, Stanford, and WHO. This free model has been successfully tested in North American medical and public health arenas with students, and in community health workers and primary care physicians in Kenya and in India — showing identical knowledge gain and greater student satisfaction compared with traditional courses, positive effects on complex health worker behaviors (like counseling) and attitudes (like stigma), and the creation of a global community of learning and practice. Courses are competency-based, ranging from undergraduate and community health worker training through graduate medical education, and include a local or global peer community, along with skills-oriented mentorships. Please come learn more about us or have a look at our available courses.
Every learner has full access to course materials, but some courses have academic prerequisites for obtaining a certificate. For example, Emergency Medicine is a course for advanced practice healthcare providers who may intubate patients. To earn a certificate a leaner should be studying to become a physician, advanced practice nurse, or physician assistant.
Do you want to train health professionals, but are more interested in teaching the practical components, and leaving the book-learning/didactics to others? Whether you’re a university professor wanting to teach a formal course, or a community healthcare provider supervising clinical trainees, have a look at our courses and their easy instructions for mentors.
Your institution is welcome to offer these courses at no charge to increase your student satisfaction and organizational sustainability. Many partnering institutions offer courses to students in low and mid-income countries with local partners for free, and to others at a reduced rate, and also give back to the NextGenU.org community by co-developing. and studying new courses to share.
NextGenU.org is the world’s first portal where anyone, anywhere, can get free, higher education certificates. We use expert-created competencies and resources and work in partnership with experts and professional organizations for quality assurance and endorsement. We use cutting-edge educational innovations, including computer-based learning resources, and local and web-based peer-to-peer and mentoring experiences.
NextGenU.org’s learning model builds on educational best practices, including using high-quality online learning materials (e.g., text, videos, images), interactive peer activities (e.g., online chat rooms, and creating and assessing peer-generated case studies, images, and multiple-choice questions), and hands-on mentored experiences (e.g., seeing and discussing patients). This model mirrors and expands on the traditional university experience through interacting with peers and experts in the field of study, while learning basic knowledge on one’s own via online learning materials. Our courses do not require traditional faculty involvement in lectures (that’s part of how NextGenU.org can offer the trainings for free), although some competency sets require mentor-supervised activities (and those are spelled out in each course). We also strongly encourage teachers and training institutions around the world to link to the resources we’ve collected, even including creating full degrees with collections of our courses. We’d love to hear about it at info@NextGenU.org — we’re happy to provide you with data on your students if you’re an institution wishing to adopt our training.
No costs or strings are attached, although we would like to evaluate and improve your experience and co-author peer-reviewed publications using de-identified data with you (we have considerable experience in doing so).
We are not a university. We do not grant credit or degrees; our university partners and other partners already accredited by their governments and professional societies give the credit for select courses (for free). Some people refer to us as the world’s first free university, likely because no one else offers free university-level courses with free testing and certification for academic credit to the whole world, without limits of number or place.
Our business model is based on the efficient beneficence of grateful learners/inspired donors. Grateful learners include the many thousands of professionals who have freely posted the resources NextGenU.org links to, along with the course creators and staff who have created this site, either as volunteers or typically earning no more than USD 25 per hour. We also expect that many of NextGenU.org’s trainees will donate money and/or time to create additional trainings, or to serve as mentors. More traditional donors have been key, as well — inspired individuals, organizations, and governments that have collaborated with us, both financially and intellectually.
Please click
or write to donate@nextgenu.org if you’re interested in joining these grateful and inspired people.
Many people have asked us why we don’t charge at least a little. First, we (and, we believe,the courts) don’t think that it’s legal or ethical fair use to charge a student to access material that we’ve neither developed nor posted, and which has been posted by others for free. Second, we have seen other organizations try different (but always monetized) systems, and they’ve not been very successful. And third, we’ve figured out how we can give it away, so why should we charge? (That’s the .org in us.)
Students, practitioners, universities, health ministries, and other training institutions in every country.
Yes — we are the first cost-free, barrier-free, advertisement-free, educational organization available to everyone around the world.
An abundance of free educational resources already exists. The expert-derived competencies are often freely posted, as are the expert-created online learning resources (taken only from universities, governments, peer-reviewed journals, and professional societies) that address those competencies. We identify and pair the competencies with resources and with interactive experiences that we create for trainees to perform with mentors and peer trainees. Trainees also write reviews of each other’s work and interact in chat rooms, forming an engaging global and sustainable community of practice, all for free. Training materials are further checked for quality and only posted after our expert volunteer Advisory Groups and co-sponsoring accredited organizations approve them.
Our technical support capacity is small, and you will need to access local support for any personal needs. However, we’d certainly like to know immediately if there are site-related issues that require fixing; please contact us at support@NextGenU.org.
If you look here, you can see where we have tested and published on this free model in North American medical, public health, and undergraduate students arenas and with community health workers and primary care physicians in Kenya and in India, with as much knowledge gain and greater student satisfaction than with traditional courses, along with the creation of a community of practice that has learned to interact globally and productively.
email: info@nextgenu.org
NextGenU.org offers free courses with free certificates, covering curricula across the health sciences, making these materials openly available to learners, teachers, and institutions. NextGenU.org also partners with learning institutions to build capacity and strengthen degree programs, including freely offering a full curriculum for a Master’s Degree in Public Health; medical, nursing, and community health worker education; and specialized training in Addiction Medicine.