In 2024, Power Teachers conducted a review of freely available websites for professional development online courses for teachers. Here we present you with our top 10 professional development sites for accessing free courses, with a focus on courses for teachers working in low-income countries and resource poor environments.
This is our favourite, from the CommonWealth Education Trust! Teach 2030 is an excellent teacher training resource for teachers working in low resource environments. You can do the courses on your mobile phone and they use very little data.
- Teachers’ Resource Centre at the International Teacher Task Force
The Resource Centre has compiled freely available courses for teachers from a variety of organisations.
3. Alison
Alison is a free online learning platform, one of the top 5000 websites globally, with over 14 million registered and two million graduates has some excellent Education courses, from Certificate to Diploma level, in special needs education, training strategies, psychology. Complete the courses for free, you pay for Certification.
4. Open Learn Create courses from Open University
There are a number of courses here for teachers on developing your teaching skills and your content knowledge, in particular for secondary teachers. A very useful course, focused on low-income countries, is the comprehensive General Teaching Methods course devised by Enabel for teachers in Uganda.
5. TESSA
Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) is a collaborative network, supported by the Open University, to support teachers in SSA with free courses, as well as books, videos, and other teacher professional development resources to help you improve your teaching practices, all based on national curricula in SSA.
Free online six week six module course entitled ‘Becoming a more effective teacher’ available.
Choose from a selection of free courses, from teaching children with dyslexia to subject based to general pedagogy. It also includes newly developed courses to support teachers with online learning.
8. EDx
EdX offers online education courses covering a broad range of topics from educational policy and history to curriculum design and teaching techniques. The courses are free and you can choose to pay for a certificate.
9. Coursera
Coursera offers courses in many areas including to degree level. It also has very good and free teacher training courses. You can choose the language, skill level, duration and type of course.
- Teacher Toolkit Set up in 2008, by a teacher, Ross McGill with 25+years’ experience, it has a large following of teachers. The site includes excellent resources and courses for teachers, only some of which require payment.
If you come across other useful teacher training courses online please let us know on: info@powerteachersafrica.org