Alison Courses is a free online education platform for learners in school, work, or personal development alike. The company has been spotlighted in numerous publications you’ve actually heard of: Forbes, GQ, The New York Times, Yahoo News, BBC News, and more. With over 20M learners, it’s a worldwide success, and no wonder—it’s free, after all!
Need more proof? All this Alison Courses review had to do to get an idea of the company’s reach was quickly check its social media accounts. The brand has a combined following of 543K across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
This Alison Courses review will give you all the essential lowdown on the company: how it got started, what courses are offered, how the whole thing works, and what learners had to say about the service. We’ve done all the work for you already, so get ready to learn about how you can learn!
Overview of Alison
The brains behind Alison is Irish-American entrepreneur Mike Feerick, who founded the company in 2007 as a means to provide accessible education for a variety of learners—from an elementary school student struggling in math, to a young professional looking to upskill in their field, to a retired senior interested in learning a new hobby.
Another of the driving forces behind the company is the unfortunate fact that quality education the world over is becoming more and more the province of the monied. By contrast, Alison is “dedicated to making it possible for anyone, to study anything, anywhere, at any time, for free online, at any subject level.”
As the numbers show, that mission has evidently been a wild success. Headquartered in Galway, Ireland, Alison now hosts over 20 million learners in 195 countries.
So that’s the inspiring story behind the company—now it’s time for our Alison Courses review to give you a bird’s-eye view of this service’s highlights before we get into the nitty-gritty details.
How Does Alison Work?
Alison learning is broken up into three Study Areas:
- Academic
- Workplace
- Personal Development
Once you’ve chosen your Study Area, you’ll need to select your Study Sector, which is different for each Area.
For Academic, you can choose either Primary, Secondary, or Third Level instruction—this spans the range from kindergarten to higher learning institutions.
For Workplace, choose Job Role Training if you’re interested in upskilling for a specific position, or Formal Learning if you’re preparing for professional exams and trade assessments.
Under Personal Development, you can choose either Activities & Hobbies (which is pretty self-explanatory) or Personal Improvement.
Your time commitment will depend on the courses themselves. Depending on the field you’ve selected and the learning goals you’re trying to achieve, courses can take anywhere from 2-3 hours to 18-20 hours.
Alison Courses Review
Alison online courses are divided into three types, which we’ve listed below in ascending order of intensity and duration:
- Certificate Courses (2-3 hours)
- Diploma Courses (8-10 hours)
- Learning Paths (18-20 hours)
Alison Certificate Courses focus on specific topics—everything from caregiving skills for dementia care to python coding, retail management, office professionalism, and teaching English as a second language.
Diploma Courses are more extensive, covering a wider field than the mini-subjects that the Certificate Courses. Subjects include caregiving, customer service, human resources, and more.
The third section of Alison free courses are Learning Paths. These are the most extensive studies of a subject area. Learning Paths are made up of multiple niche courses that will broaden your knowledge in subjects like English language studies, accounting, and physics over the course of 18-20 hours of learning time.
Which Alison Courses Come With Free Certificates?
No Alison courses come with free certificates, but you will receive a learner record that indicates which courses/Learning Paths you have completed. To get a more official certificate that you can frame for your wall or pull out of your pocket at any given moment to brag about your achievement, you’ll need to purchase it.
How Long do Alison Courses Take?
Alison courses take different amounts of time depending on the type of course. As noted above, Certificate Courses will take 2-3 hours, Diploma Courses will take 8-10 hours, and Learning Paths are 18-20 hours.
Is Alison Accredited in The US?
Not really, but Alison is still recognized and valued by employers in the US. According to the site, over 50% of graduates (globally) found a job or were promoted because of their studies on the free learning platform.
Who is Alison For?
Our Alison Courses review found that the brand is for [drumroll please] pretty much anyone! From kindergarten to retirement age, Alison has something for everyone because its courses cover everything from academic to professional to personal goals.
Basically, if you’re interested in learning, check out Alison Courses. You’re sure to find something to tickle your brain cells (in a healthy way) and help you with your next step into the wonderful world of knowledge.
How Much is Alison?
In case you weren’t paying attention earlier, Alison Courses are free! The only catch is that if you want an official-looking certificate, you’ll have to pay. The certificate price depends on the program you completed, but generally ranges from about $25 to $137.
Alison Reviews: What Do Customers Think?
To make our Alison Courses review as detailed as possible (because we know you love the learning—as do we!), we dug up customer comments from the Alison website, Trustpilot, Facebook, and the Google Play Store.
On the website, testimonials are overwhelmingly in favour of Alison and what it has to offer. Many reviews include some variation of the claim that “Alison changed my life”—high praise indeed!
One graduate of courses for Operations Management, Quality Control, Quality Assurance, and Law credited the service for helping him double his salary thanks to its free online instruction. Here’s his advice to learners interested in Alison:
“You have so much potential by taking the courses, increasing your qualifications, adding quality to your resume when you job-hunt, and becoming—if not standing out—as a more appropriate individual for companies that are looking for workers like you.”
Still, we can’t just stick to home base—this Alison Courses review has to scope out other sources if we want to get the full picture, and some of them paint the service in quite a different light.
On Trustpilot, Alison scores 2.5/5 stars from 102 reviews. There are still a handful of positive comments here from users who actually learned a thing or two and loved the experience of it all.
Most of all, they loved the fact that Alison is free, fully (and conveniently) online and remote, and offers courses on a variety of subjects and learning levels that are taught by knowledgeable tutors.
One such satisfied customer said that they were writing their review on Trustpilot to hit back against the “trolls” leaving negative comments. This learner said that they were super-grateful to be able to take free courses online that are “great for extra knowledge and learning more about particular subjects.”
This customer knows well and good that Alison free certificates aren’t official documents equivalent to years of study at a university, for which you pay thousands.
Instead, the courses “show potential employers that you are willing to learn. That you have took the time to learn about topics within that particular career…. These are good for putting on your c.v and shows employers that you are interested and willing to work hard within this career.”
Facebook is much kinder to Alison than Trustpilot, with the service pulling in 4.4/5 stars from 1,738 reviews. That’s more than 10 times the number of reviewers on Trustpilot, so it’s likely that Facebook is more accurate.
Commenters love how “professional,” “expert,” and “highly educated” Alison’s teachers are. Accessibility is also a huge bonus, because you can learn “from anywhere at anytime” and in your “own time and learning style”—and that’s not even mentioning the sweet, sweet freeness of it all.
One learner who was completing courses in the Personal Development vertical raved about how “fun” the courses were, and how beneficial they are to diverse people:
“Often come across interesting courses i would never have thought to study. im studying my first course in graphic design and gosh it is so interesting!!! great to have all the courses provided free and accessible online 24/7 which is great for everyone, but in particular parents, people already working.”
As the last area of our investigation, the Google Play Store offered some helpful opinions from haters and lovers of Alison. Overall, the platform scored 4.5/5 stars from 9,711 reviews.
The good feedback (and, again, it was mostly good) once again praised the knowledgeable teachers, called the platform a “great opportunity for education” and upskilling, and were pleased that the service allows you to learn on your own time in your own way.
When this Alison Courses review weighs all this up, it’s pretty clear that the higher scores, as well as higher number of respondents, on Facebook and the Google Play Store outweigh the Trustpilot ratings.