As you report on medical studies more and more, you probably start to notice patterns in the parts that you find confusing or difficult to parse. You start to realize where you need the most help in understanding a study, or perhaps you know you need to refine your skills but aren’t sure how.

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) are a great way to sharpen some skills and learn some new ones. A variety of universities and companies offer MOOCs, an online course involving video lessons, reading assignments, message boards, tests and/or other aspects of a typical online course. The difference is that MOOCs are free (unless you want to pay extra for an official certificate showing you completed one), and many are self-paced or allow you take them even after the course has officially ended.

The two largest distributors of MOOCs are Coursera and EdX, both of which offers courses from universities such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Stanford and even overseas schools, such as the University of Cape Town. The instructors are actual instructors from those schools, either full professors, department heads, researchers or adjuncts. The lesson updates are emailed to you each week, and you can estimate the time you need each week (anywhere from an hour or two up to 15 hours) for that course.

Some require prerequisites or recommend certain base knowledge skills (such as calculus for more advanced biostatistics classes or “Epidemiology 1” before taking “Epidemiology II”). Many courses repeat a few times a year so you can catch it again if it’s not available now, and others allow you to take a course that’s already finished at your own pace. And of course, like Amazon and many other online shopping sites, pages featuring one course will usually show you similar or related courses you might also want to check out.

I skimmed through the offerings recently at Coursera and EdX for courses related in some form to medical studies and drug development. The list below is not comprehensive, and several of these are already in session or already completed, but they provide a sense of what kinds of courses are offered.

Epidemiology and medicine

• Clinical Epidemiology — Utrecht University
• Epidemiology: The Basic Science of Public Health — The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Gateway to Medicine: An Introduction to the Field of Medicine — Tsinghua University

Clinical trials and studies

• Design and Interpretation of Clinical Trials — Johns Hopkins University
• Introduction to Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis — Johns Hopkins University
• Introduction to Translational Science — University of Rochester
• Pragmatic Randomized Controlled Trials in Health Care — Karolinska Institutet, Sweden
• Understanding Clinical Research: Behind the Statistics — University of Cape Town

Drugs

• Drug Development — University of California, San Diego
• Drug Discovery — University of California, San Diego
• Drug Commercialization — University of California, San Diego
• Drugs and the Brain — Caltech

Biostatistics and terminology

• Biostatistics for Big Data Applications — utmb Health
• Clinical Terminology for International and US Students — University of Pittsburgh
• A Crash Course in Causality: Inferring Causal Effects from Observational Data — University of Pennsylvania — This is an advanced course which recommends familiarity with R, if not a working knowledge. It also recommends familiarity with basic probability and traditional statistical methods, such as regression models.
• Introduction to Applied Biostatistics: Statistics for Medical Research — Osaka University
• Methods and Statistics in Social Sciences Specialization — University of Amsterdam
• Principles, Statistical and Computational Tools for Reproducible Science — Harvard University

Here is a list of even more MOOCs that might be relevant to your beat.