Microsoft is now offering free online courses through edX Inc, an online learning platform that works with some of the U.S’s largest organizations and educational institutes, such as Harvard, MIT and Berkeley.

“Microsoft has a long history of working within the community to make coding and app development more accessible and rewarding to the growing number of people who want to help shape the technology industry,” said Steve Guggenheimer, Corporate Vice President & Chief Evangelist, Developer Experience at Microsoft.

There are seven courses to choose from that can be enrolled in right now, all taught by some of Redmond’s finest, including Building Cloud Apps with Microsoft Azure, programming with C#, and intro to Office 365 APIs and Querying with Transact SQL. Courses, which are recommended for both newbies and professionals, will start at the end of March and the beginning of April.

The courses themselves, says Microsoft General Manager of Learning Experience Alison Cunard, “are focused on the most widely applicable, in-demand technical skills and feature interactive coding, assessments, and exercises.” He adds that Microsoft is the first corporation to offer MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) on edX.

Students can also audit the course, giving them access to all course materials, group activities, and more. Once the course if finished an MOOC auditing student can receive an honor code certificate, non-auditing students are able pay the small fee. The first two MOOC courses offered by Microsoft are TypeScript and Building Cloud Apps.

If you’re not familiar with edX, we suggest you browse through their website. All 456 courses taught by academics and professionals of the highest order, are free to join. There’s much more than IT on offer, so while you’ve got your teeth stuck into Office 365 APIs, you can be learning the science of happiness at Berkeley, and the history of American capitalism at Cornell – all of which should put you in stead when you become CEO of your own tech company.

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