Berkeleytime is perhaps the most popular student site for students at UC Berkeley.
It was founded by student volunteers who wanted to create a complete catalog displaying all courses available at UC Berkeley, along with class schedules and course information.
While it has generally positive reviews, it’s only useful for UC Berkeley students; non-students may instead benefit from online courses offered at sites like MIT OCW or the AcademicEarth open course catalog.
In today’s article, we will learn more about Berkeleytime’s history, check out some reviews of the site, and explore some other alternatives that are similar in nature.
Let’s get into it.
Berkeleytime History
Berkeleytime was created by a small group of volunteers – students at UC Berkeley who wanted to provide a resource for fellow students to find courses and schedules at the university easily and efficiently.
It has a foundation grounded in three values:
- Growth
- Curiosity
- Passion
The two founders behind Berkeleytime are Yuxin Zhu and Noah Gilmore, while the ASUC Office of the CTO is in charge of maintaining the site.
Some of the current members on the team include:
- Kevin Wang, product manager and backend engineer
- Henric Zhang, frontend engineer
- Michelle Tran, designer
The Berkeleytime project has been going on for a while. Understandably, as the student base at the university changes, the students who volunteer to be in charge of the website will change as well.
There is a Github page associated with the project, along with a wiki, although the wiki hasn’t been updated in a while. You can also join in on the discussion and check out past issues people have experienced with the project on the Github page.
Do note that the project is actively maintained, as the students who volunteer to manage the website meet every week to share ideas, discuss potential changes, and plan for the future of the project.
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Berkeleytime Reviews
While Berkeleytime is popular among students at UC Berkeley, people who don’t study there don’t have much benefit from it. Therefore, it’s a very niche website, and as such, there are few reviews of it online.
Therefore, I will start with my own review of the site, followed by select reviews and comments curated from third-party sites.
In my opinion, Berkeleytime is the perfect example of how a student-run project should be. It is a complete catalog of the courses available at UC Berkeley, and it will be extremely useful to any student at UC Berkeley who is interested in finding out which courses are available for them to sign up for.
The site is well-designed. It’s not super flashy or fancy, but it is incredibly easy to use, and it is clear the designers have prioritized the user experience and user-friendliness above all else.
In the catalog, you can view all courses available from the university. Furthermore, you can use filters to find the specific course you are looking for more easily.
Filters include:
- Requirements
- Unit
- Department
- Class level
- Semester
There are also several sorting options. In the results, you will see some basic information about each course, including the course name, a short one-line description, and the enrollment percentage (which allows you to see if there are any places left for you).
When you click on any of the courses that appear in the results, it will show you additional information about the course, including:
- The number of students enrolled out of the total limit allowed
- Enrollment percentage
- Basic information about what the course will teach
- Class times, location, date, instructor information, etc.
An extremely useful tool is the class scheduler tool. It allows you to add classes from the catalog and build up your schedule.
You will generate an easy-to-follow calendar, which you can use to keep track of the classes you are supposed to attend.
All in all, I can confidently conclude that Berkeleytime is one of the most helpful tools for Berkeley students. It is free and available for anyone to use, so there’s nothing to lose by checking it out.
Now, let’s turn to third-party reviews. On ScamAdvisor, a site that checks sites for scams or fraud and assigns each site a safety rating, Berkeleytime has a trust rating of 100 out of 100.
In other words, it is entirely safe to use, free of malware, viruses, scams, and adware. Some of the things that contributed to this good score include the age of the website and the fact that it has a valid SSL certificate.
There are no third party reviews left by users on ScamAdvisor just yet, but check back for updates.
There aren’t that many more mentions of Berkeleytime online, although this Reddit commenter states that Berkeleytime has accurate data that you can rely on for grades and course difficulty information.
You can find other positive comments about Berkeleytime on this Reddit thread, along with some tips from users on how to make the most out of the site as a UC Berkeley student.
On Accessify, there is also some technical information about the Berkeleytime website. According to Accessify, Berkeleytime:
- Renders faster than 66 percent of other websites
- Has visual factors that make it more accessible than 95 percent of websites
- Is more SEO friendly than 91 percent of websites
In conclusion: Berkeleytime is an awesome site that offers many great features and is easy to use, with great performance and an excellent user experience. Nevertheless, if you are looking for Berkeleytime alternatives, read on.
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Berkeleytime Alternatives
In this section, we will be listing the best alternatives to Berkeleytime. Most of the alternatives, except the first one, let you find free online courses even if you are not a student at UC Berkeley or any university.
1. Berkeley Academic Guide
The Berkeley Academic Guide is the university’s official class schedule and course catalog offered to students for free. While it is not as easy to navigate as Berkeleytime, it is an official university source, so it might be more accurate than Berkeleytime at times.
In addition, it offers all the information you would need to know as a new or existing student at UC Berkeley, including a guide to enrolling in UC Berkeley, information about academic policies at the university, and more.
For example, you can find information on how to apply for and get financial aid to study at the university and information about tuition fees and how to pay your tuition.
The class schedule section lets you search for specific classes and their schedules. You can search for specific subjects or enter a keyword to find a class you are looking for.
Alternatively, you can search by instructor if you want to find classes taught by a specific professor you love, or you can use the major requirements search tool to find classes that meet the requirements of different majors, such as:
- Physics
- Classical Civilizations
- Data Science
- And many others
There are additional filters on the left side of the screen. You can filter by term or mode of instruction.
That allows you, for example, to find classes that are offered online, in person, in a hybrid manner, etc. You can also search for recorded classes.
Here are some other filters that you can apply to the class schedule search results to better refine your search:
- Which days of the week the class is offered
- The course level (graduate, upper division, etc.)
- Units
- Course type
- General requirements
- Special studies
The Course Catalog is where you can find a long list of courses offered by the university, in alphabetical order. Clicking on any course will bring up more information about the units included in each course as well as a brief description of each unit.
It’s important to note that not all the courses listed on the page will be offered every semester, which is why it is also important to check out the class schedule to see which ones are offered in the current semester.
2. AcademicEarth
If you are looking to find online courses and are not a student at UC Berkeley, though, Berkeleytime won’t be of much use to you. You’ll have to look for other alternatives, and AcademicEarth is one of the best ones.
Instead of focusing on courses offered by UC Berkeley, it includes a catalog of FREE university courses available online from top universities. You can search for online courses by subject – available subjects include marketing, business, accounting, psychology, and many others.
You can also browse courses by university. Some of the featured universities on the site include:
- Stanford (over 120 courses available)
- UC Berkeley (over 60 courses available)
- MIT (over 200 courses available)
Some of the courses available at MIT, for example, include Aerodynamics, Advanced Macroeconomics I, and Advanced Macroeconomics II.
If you want to view a course online, just click on View Course. You will see all of the course details and be able to download the course for free.
In total, there are also more than 1,500 educational videos available on the site from top universities and other sources.
While you can’t get an actual degree or any credits for studying most of these courses, as they are available for download for free without registration, they are still useful if you want to broaden your knowledge on a subject.
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3. MIT OpenCourseware
If you’re interested in finding free online courses from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you can check out MIT OpenCourseware, or OCW.
The OCW web platform is a project by MIT, launched in 2001, to offer all of the course materials at MIT covering the entire MIT curriculum – yup, you heard that right – for free online, to anyone who wants to access it.
There are over 2,400 courses in total on the platform, so you can study pretty much anything that is taught at MIT. Not only that, but most of the courses have additional study materials, such as exams (sometimes with solutions provided), lecture notes, homework problems, and even web demonstrations, textbooks, and video lectures.
Here are examples of some of the courses available on the site at the moment:
- Introduction to Experimental Chemistry
- Just Money: Banking as if Society Mattered
- Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing
- Introduction to Computational Thinking
If you want to expand your knowledge and enjoy self-study, MIT OCW is the place to go.
4. Open Yale Courses
Open Yale Courses is a website by Yale. It’s a project designed to offer a selection of certain introductory courses taught by Yale professors for free, online, to anyone interested.
Registration is not required, and you will not earn any university credit. Instead, it’s simply offered as a free service to the public.
The courses were actually recorded in real Yale classrooms and come complete with text, audio, and video. You can download the videos, listen to the audio, and browse the supplemental materials, such as problem sets and suggested reading lists.
Some of the courses currently available on the site include:
- African American History: From Emancipation to the Present (2010)
- Freshman Organic Chemistry I and Freshman Organic Chemistry II
- Financial Markets
- Financial Theory
There are many more courses available. Check out the course catalog to see which courses you can study.
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5. Hillsdale College Online
HIllsdale College Online offers a selection of free online courses. Founded in 1844, Hillsdale College is a private institution based out of Hillsdale, Michigan.
The Hillsdale College Online initiative was launched in 2011 in alignment with Hillsdale College’s original mission statement, which is to provide a free and accessible education to all who wish.
The courses on the website are taught by the top professors at the university, and they come complete with videos, quizzes, study guides, and even discussion boards. Designed for self-paced learning, the courses do not offer any type of credit or a chance for a degree.
Here are some of the courses currently available on the website:
- The Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic (in History)
- The David Story: Shepherd, Father, and King (in Literature)
- Mathematics and Logic: From Euclid to Modern Geometry (in Mathematics and Natural Sciences)
You can filter by subject or lecturer. See the entire course list here.
You can also order DVD sets, available for a tax-deductible donation of $100 or more.
All in all, Hillsdale College Online is a great way to expand your knowledge about a variety of niche subjects.
Note that Hillsdale College is conservative, Christian, and right-leaning, and the course syllabus on political and social matters may reflect that in the viewpoints it takes.
6. Saylor Academy
Saylor Academy, founded in 2008, offers over 300 courses that you can take online, at your own pace. Not only that, but for some courses, there is the chance to earn college credit that you can use towards your degree, which is rare when it comes to online university courses.
Saylor Academy works with colleges and universities to provide tuition-free transfer credit on some of its courses. However, the credit will only work with select degree completion partners that have partnered with Saylor Academy, so make sure the university you choose is on the list.
You do have to take exams to earn this transferable credit, and that does come with a small fee of $5 for each final exam attempt to pay the proctoring service that Saylor Academy uses.
The proctoring service is automatic. In other words, you don’t have to schedule an exam in advance – you can take it at any time, and your screen and camera will be recorded for proctors at SmarterProctoring (which Saylor Academy has partnered with) to review later.
You can retake the exam if you didn’t pass, but you only get three attempts in total, and you must wait at least 14 days between each attempt.
The courses are usually sourced from openly available material, such as MIT OCW, but Saylor Academy does fund the creation of entirely new sources when necessary. Also, the courses are available for free without registration, but if you’d like to take the exams and earn credit, you will have to create an account – it’s still free.
The course catalog covers subjects such as Biology, Business Administration, Computer Science, Chemistry, Economics, and many others. The website is pretty easy to navigate, and it instantly became one of my favorites – I plan to use it myself to enrich my knowledge on certain subjects.
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7. CMU Open Learning Initiative
CMU, or Carnegie Mellon University, is a private university based in Pittsburgh, founded in 1900. It has an Open Learning Initiative, where independent learners can access free courses open to the public online, as well as low-cost courses as an alternative to traditional university studies. You won’t get credit or a degree for studying these courses, but you’ll still learn a lot.
Here are some of the courses currently available on the platform:
- Computer Science and Programming
- Data Science and Causal Reasoning
- Language and Speech
- Social Sciences
CMU Open Learning Initiative is a good alternative to Berkeleytime if you want to focus on any of these areas: cognitive science, computer engineering, or human-computer interaction. That’s because it is the main area of focus of CMU in general, and the courses you will find on CMU OLI reflect that.
8. edX
edX is one of the largest open learning initiatives and catalogs in the world. It was created by scientists from Harvard and MIT and offers various courses, which are offered by different universities through edX to develop specific skills that can help you advance your career.
You can also get professional certificates from completing courses at edX as well as a complete online master’s degree. For example, here are some master’s degrees currently offered at edX:
- Master of Business Administration by Syracuse University
- Master’s Degree in Data Science by The University of Texas at Austin
- Master of Science in Applied Data Science by Syracuse University
There are also complete online bachelor’s degrees and MicroBachelor’s degrees. Note that the online tuition costs for full bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at edX can be very high and comparable to standard university tuition fees.
Nevertheless, there are plenty of free courses available on edX as well, offered by top instructors across the nation. These courses are offered by top universities and institutions such as Yale, Harvard, MIT, and The University of Maryland.
You can browse courses by subject. Some of the courses, for example, include:
- Cell Biology: Mitochondria, by HarvardX
- Introduction to Biology – the Secret of Life, by MITx
- Python Basics for Data Science, by IBM
- The Science of Happiness, by BerkeleyX
- SQL for Data Science, by IBM
The courses are usually structured in weekly sequences. For example, a course might last for eight weeks, with new materials and quizzes available each week.
Again, while some courses are free, others cost money, although there are many affordable courses among the paid ones as well.
9. Coursera
Coursera is another website where you can find free online courses, as well as bachelor’s degrees from online universities.
It was founded in 2012 by computer science professors from Stanford University, and it is also one of the largest open online course providers.
There are more than 5,400 courses available on Coursera, offered by over 150 different universities and educational institutions.
A course might last anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, with a certain number of hours of video learning each week. Courses typically have quizzes, exercises, and even peer-reviewed assignments as well.
The degrees are offered by institutions such as the University of Illinois, while you can also earn professional certificates from Google, IBM, and Meta, which can help you find jobs not only at those companies but at other companies that might value such certificates as well.
Here are some examples of certificates you can earn:
- Semiconductor Photonics Graduate Certificate, by University of Colorado Boulder
- Certificate in Investment Management, by Indian School of Business
- CPA Pathways Graduate Certificate, by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
There are also MasterTrack certificates, which help accelerate earning your master’s degree, as well as complete master’s degrees.
An example of a bachelor’s degree you can get through Coursera is the Bachelor of Science in Computer Science by the University of London. There are also plenty of free courses available through Coursera.
Wrapping It Up
Berkeleytime is a useful site if you are a student at UC Berkeley and would like to find courses you can enroll in or create a schedule.
However, if you don’t study at UC Berkeley and would like to enrich your knowledge, there are plenty of open courseware sites, such as MIT OCW, which offer education for free.
Furthermore, there are sites that offer complete degrees, such as edX, or credit that you can transfer to get a degree, such as the free Saylor Academy.
