# Use It While It’s Free: Thoughts on the Death of MOOCs


(Translated from the Chinese version with the help of ChatGPT.)

A while ago, while listening to [Bach](../2026-03-12-bach-1/), I decided I wanted to systematically fill in some gaps in my knowledge of music—music theory, history, and so on. I remembered that I had saved [Introduction to Classical Music](https://www.coursera.org/learn/introclassicalmusic) on Coursera years ago. It was quite good, and I had worked my way through part of it on and off.

Recently I finally had some free time and opened it again, only to discover that the free audit option was gone!

Disaster, folks. Absolute disaster.

The amount of content you can access for free has now been reduced to just the first module—out of nine. Well, as Wang Leehom sang in *All the Things You Never Knew*: you only learn to cherish something after you've lost it.

Of course, this gradual tightening is perfectly understandable. If too many people are freeloading, who's going to pay the bills to keep the website running?

In the beginning, open courses were mostly scattered efforts by individual universities—[Open Yale Courses](https://oyc.yale.edu/), [MIT OpenCourseWare](https://ocw.mit.edu/), and so on. [NetEase Open Courses](https://open.163.com/) also collected quite a few courses translated and subtitled by volunteers working purely out of enthusiasm.

Then Coursera, Udacity, edX, and a few other major platforms came along, promising to democratize courses from the world's top universities and make them freely available to everyone.

What a utopian vision!

But all good things must come to an end. In the end, these companies' business models converged on much the same destination: professional and vocational training.

A shame.

Still, no big deal. An earlier version of the music course is still available on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_yOVARO2Oc&list=PLh9mgdi4rNezhx8YiGIV8I22ICSuzslja), so I'd better get studying while I can.

There's also an anonymous blogger on 1Point3Acres who writes extensively about art-focused travel in Europe ([collection of posts](https://www.1point3acres.com/bbs/thread-1031893-1-1.html)). They repeatedly recommended edX's [Introduction to European Painting](https://learning.edx.org/course/course-v1:UC3Mx+CEH.1-ENx+3T2026/home).

A new session opened on September 1, and this time I wasted no time—I finished the whole thing right away. My notes are [here](../../zh-cn/notes/painting/europe-edx/) (in Chinese). Next time I visit the Met, I'll have a whole new set of things to look for.

That said, even if MOOCs as a format are dying, getting access to knowledge is easier than ever now thanks to LLMs.

So while they're still free to use: enjoy them while they last!