Several colleges and universities publish free online courses that are especially beneficial to homeschool high school students looking for a rigorous, college-level challenge:  

  • MIT OpenCourseWare – Many undergraduate and graduate courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are published online for free.  
  • Hillsdale College Free Online Courses – This conservative college offers free video courses in Government & Politics, Literature, History, Religion, Education, and Economics.  
  • Coursera – This platform collaborates with over 200 universities and companies to provide video-recorded courses that are free to audit.  
  • MERLOT – The Multimedia Education for Learning Online Teaching website has a large collection of free higher-education resources.  
  • Kadenze – This platform also offers many online courses that are free to audit, including courses in art and creative technology.  
  • Open Culture – Open Culture’s website has a collection of 1,5000 free online courses from colleges like Harvard and Penn State.  

Free resources to supplement your homeschool curriculum include:  

  • TED-Ed – This site allows parents and students to create or access existing lessons based off of TED talks and animated videos.  
  • NASA STEM@Home – NASA’s website offers science, technology, engineering, and math activities for K-12 students.  
  • Project Gutenberg – This online library has over 60,000 free ebooks, most of which are older works now in the public domain.  
  • HippoCampus – HippoCampus pulls education videos from websites like Khan and STEMbite into one organized location. Students can watch over 7,000 videos in 13 subject areas.  
  • Prager University – PragerU is a conservative nonprofit that produces educational videos on political, economic, and philosophical topics.  

Free homeschool curriculum resources include:  

  • Freedom Homeschooling – This website brings together a selection of free curriculum and organizes resources by subject and grade level.  
  • Easy Peasy All-In-One Homeschool – Easy Peasy offers preschool through high school lesson plans and resources on its website. There is a separate site with a curriculum for high schoolers.  
  • AmblesideOnline – This is a free online curriculum that follows the Charlotte Mason teaching method.  
  • Mater Amabilis – Mater Amabilis is an online preK-12 curriculum designed for Catholic students. The curriculum also follows the Charlotte Mason teaching method. 
  • Homeschool College USA – This site offers a curriculum that can help students pass CLEP tests in high school (or after) and earn college credits from home.  

Resources for Pennsylvanian homeschoolers:  

  • Pa Dept. Of Education – PDE provides sample affidavits, diplomas, resources, and applications on its website.  
  • Homeschool Legal Defense Association – HSLDA provides step-by-step instructions for complying with homeschool laws in its series “How to Homeschool in Pennsylvania”.   
  • Historical Society of Pennsylvania – This site has educational resources for teachers and students, including primary sources and unit plans on the history of Pennsylvania. 
  • The Pennsylvania Capitol – This website has printable pamphlets and classroom activities for students related to Pennsylvania government and the state capitol.  

In a wonderful spirit of “we’re in this together,” many businesses and non-profits opened a treasure trove of online resources when COVID shutdowns began: