TL;DR
You’ll find 16 online physics programs and courses below. The programs are live, with an instructor, a cohort, and an application you plan months for. The courses are self-paced university material you can start today for free. While a course teaches you physics, Horizon has you use it: a full term with a PhD mentor on a research question you pick, ending in a paper you can send to journals and competitions. It’s fully online, and cohorts start three times a year. Apply to Horizon.
Self-paced courses vs live programs
Self-paced means the material sits there and waits for you – it is asynchronous. The trade is real, though. Nobody’s grading you, nobody emails when you go quiet, and the finish rate on open online courses is famously bad. Pick a fixed hour, twice a week, before you enroll in anything.
Live means set hours, a real instructor, other students, and an application you can be turned down for. If you’d rather do that in person, we’ve got physics summer programs, physics pre-college programs, and the best of the summer options covered elsewhere.
The other option is a mentored research program that gives you the structure of a live program without the fixed classroom hours, and you come out with work of your own instead of a progress bar at 100%. If that sounds like what you’re after, compare the free mentorship programs against the paid ones before you commit to anything.
Are online physics courses as good as taking it in class?
You get the lectures, the notes, the problem sets and the exams. On the university platforms, that’s the same material the on-campus students work through, and it’s often better produced, because somebody actually filmed it properly.
What you don’t get is a lab. No optics bench, no oscilloscope, no dropping things off a tower with a stopwatch. A few courses hand you simulations, and UNSW’s asks you to run small experiments with things from your kitchen, which is the best of a limited set. If you want real equipment in your hands, an in-person summer program is the honest answer, or you can find a lab near you and ask to help out.
The one thing online physics does better than a classroom is pace. Spend three weeks on rotational motion and nobody minds. Skip the chapter you already understand and nobody stops you. For a lot of students, that’s worth more than the lab they’re missing.
Do these count for credit, AP, or anything on a transcript?
Mostly no, and it’s better to know that going in.
None of the free courses here award high school or college credit. Saylor’s PHYS101 gives you 3.3 CEUs, which is a continuing-education unit rather than college credit, and Saylor doesn’t list this particular course in its credit-recommended catalog anyway. Alison’s diploma is CPD-accredited, which means nothing to a US admissions office. A Coursera or edX certificate proves you finished. It isn’t a grade.
None of these are AP courses, and none will register you for an AP exam. Your school or a College Board-approved provider handles that. They can teach you the content, and a few cover AP Physics 1 territory closely enough to be real preparation. UNSW’s mechanics course and Saylor’s PHYS101 both overlap that syllabus well.
If you want actual transferable credit, you’re looking at a university pre-college program you pay for and take alongside undergraduates. Cornell and Brown both run them; they cost thousands, and most of the physics ones meet on campus rather than online. Our university summer programs list is the place to start if that’s the route you want.
And if what you actually want is something on your application rather than something on your transcript, that’s a different question. Work of your own tends to carry further than a completion certificate, and our guide on whether summer research actually helps with admissions goes through what admissions officers respond to.
How to choose an online physics program
| If you… | Group |
| Want a teacher, a cohort and something selective on your record | Live online programs you apply to |
| Haven’t taken physics yet, or want the whole subject start to finish | Free courses that cover a whole physics course |
| Already know the basics and want one topic in depth | Free courses on one physics topic |
Not quite what you’re after? We’ve also got online physics summer programs, physics research programs, physics research opportunities, physics programs in Washington, and 20 physics research topics if you’re still deciding what you’d even want to study.
Live online programs you can apply to
1. Stanford Program for Inspiring the Next Generation of Women in Physics
Location: Online, run over video calls, 9am to 1pm Pacific, Monday to Friday
Cost: Free
Dates: July 6 to July 24 for the 2026 cycle. Stanford hasn’t posted 2027 dates yet
Application deadline: Not published as a date. The 2026 round closed and applicants heard back by June 10, 2026. Stanford runs a mailing list for 2027
Eligibility: Grades 9 to 11 at the time you apply. Students of any gender can apply, despite the program’s name. International students are welcome
Three weeks at Stanford’s physics department, without leaving your room. You’ll do quantum mechanics, astrophysics and cosmology, learn enough Python to actually use it, and work in small groups with Stanford students and professors. There’s college planning built in too.
Who is it right for? A 9th to 11th grader who wants real physics and real mentorship, and can plan a year ahead.
2. Frontiers in Physics, Stanford Summer Institutes
Location: Online, two hours of live class daily plus an office hour, with a morning or an afternoon time slot
Cost: $3,200 tuition for 2026, plus up to $100 in materials and a $65 application fee. Need-based aid is available and doesn’t affect your chances of getting in. Stanford doesn’t publish award amounts
Dates: June 15 to 26 and July 6 to 17 for the 2026 cycle. No 2027 dates posted yet
Application deadline: March 13, 2026 for the 2026 cycle, with aid applications due March 20. The 2026 round has closed
Eligibility: Grades 10 to 11. You need an algebra course, a physical science course and some exposure to trigonometry
Two weeks on the parts of physics that usually wait until college: quantum mechanics, particle physics, and special and general relativity. Classes average about 16 students, and you’ll argue your way through the twin paradox and the barn-pole paradox with an instructor in the room rather than watching someone explain them on video.
Who is it right for? A sophomore or junior who’s finished the basics, wants the strange stuff, and has the budget or a real shot at aid.
3. Horizon Academic Research Program
Location: Online, anywhere in the world
Cost: $6,950. Need-based aid is available for households under $75,000
Dates: Fall and spring trimesters run 15 weeks, summer runs 10. The winter cohort starts December 14, 2026
Application deadline: November 22, 2026 for the winter cohort, with further deadlines through the year
Eligibility: High school students with a 3.67 unweighted GPA or higher. Horizon accepts about 26% of applicants, out of 6,539 applications
Horizon pairs you with a professor or PhD mentor for a full term of one-on-one work, and you finish with a research paper of around 5,000 words on a question you chose. Expect 8 to 10 hours a week, and 100 hours or more by the end. You’ll get a writing coach and a publication specialist alongside your mentor, and a recommendation letter from someone who watched you work for months. A finished paper is also something you can submit to journals or enter in competitions.
Who is it right for? A student who’s done the coursework and now wants to produce something of their own instead of finishing someone else’s syllabus.
Free courses that cover a whole physics course
4. Mechanics: Motion, Forces, Energy and Gravity, from Particles to Planets
Location: Online, on Coursera, taught by the University of New South Wales
Cost: Free to enroll and audit. A certificate costs extra and Coursera shows the price at checkout. Financial aid is available
Dates: Self-paced, open all year
Application deadline: None, you just enroll
Eligibility: Open to anyone. You need arithmetic, some algebra, quadratic equations, and sine, cosine and tangent. The course does not use calculus
Two weeks at about 10 hours a week, across eight modules and 46 assignments. This is the friendliest genuine physics course on the page, and the one to pick if you’ve never taken physics before. It covers kinematics, Newton’s laws, projectile and circular motion, collisions and gravity, which is most of an AP Physics 1 syllabus.
Who is it right for? Anyone starting from zero, or anyone who needs mechanics to finally click before AP Physics.
5. General Physics, BITS Pilani
Location: Online, on Coursera, taught by the Birla Institute of Technology and Science
Cost: Free to audit. Certificate price shown at checkout, and financial aid is available
Dates: Self-paced, flexible
Application deadline: None
Eligibility: Beginner level, no stated prerequisites
Five weeks at about 10 hours a week, and 10 modules that sweep through classical mechanics, thermodynamics, wave mechanics and optics. There are 122 assignments in there, which tells you it leans on practice rather than lectures.
Who is it right for? A student who wants the full survey in one place, and likes learning by working problems.
6. PHYS101: Introduction to Mechanics, Saylor Academy
Location: Online, on Saylor’s own platform
Cost: Free, and the certificate is free too
Dates: Self-paced, open year round
Application deadline: None
Eligibility: Open to anyone. High school algebra, geometry and trigonometry. The small amount of calculus you need is taught inside the course
Saylor estimates 33 hours for the average student. You’ll cover kinematics, Newtonian dynamics, rotational motion, statics, conservation laws and collisions, and then sit a final exam. Pass at 70% and the certificate is yours, with up to three attempts and a two-week wait between tries.
Who is it right for? A student who wants proof they finished something, without paying for it.
7. Advanced Diploma in High School Physics, Alison
Location: Online, on Alison
Cost: Free to study. The diploma itself costs money and Alison doesn’t publish the price, which only appears at checkout
Dates: Self-paced
Application deadline: None
Eligibility: Open to anyone, no prerequisites, no calculus
Fifteen to 20 hours of video covering kinematics, Newtonian forces, circular motion, orbital mechanics and Kepler’s laws. You need 80% to pass, which is stiffer than most. It’s available in English and Spanish.
Who is it right for? A student who’s seen this material once and wants a fast, structured run back through it.
8. Pre-University Physics, TU Delft
Location: Online, on edX, taught by Delft University of Technology
Cost: Free to audit. A paid certificate is available and no price is published on either edX or Delft’s own page
Dates: Self-paced, starts anytime
Application deadline: None
Eligibility: High school calculus is required, including derivatives and integrals, plus high school physics
Five weeks at six to eight hours a week, built to close the gap between school physics and the physics a first-year engineering student is expected to already know. It revisits mechanics, energy, forces, waves and basic electricity, then drills the mathematical formalism underneath them.
Who is it right for? A junior or senior with calculus behind them who wants to arrive at university already fluent.
9. Classical Mechanics 8.01SC, MIT OpenCourseWare
Location: Online, free materials on MIT OpenCourseWare
Cost: Free. No certificate exists, at any price
Dates: Self-paced, always available
Application deadline: None, and no registration either
Eligibility: Open to anyone. MIT lists no prerequisites and makes single-variable calculus a corequisite, so you can learn it alongside
This is MIT’s own first-year mechanics course, materials and all, organized into 12 weeks. Newton’s laws, work and energy, angular momentum, rotational dynamics, vector analysis. The instructors are Deepto Chakrabarty, Peter Dourmashkin, Michelle Tomasik, Anna Frebel and Vladan Vuletic.
Who is it right for? A confident student who wants the real MIT treatment and doesn’t need anyone to hand them a certificate.
10. How Things Work: An Introduction to Physics
Location: Online, on Coursera, taught by the University of Virginia
Cost: Free to audit. Certificate price shown at checkout, financial aid available
Dates: Self-paced, flexible deadlines
Application deadline: None
Eligibility: Coursera labels it intermediate and says some related experience is needed. No calculus requirement is stated
One week at about 10 hours, across eight modules, taught by Louis Bloomfield. It works backward from ordinary objects to the physics inside them, covering translational and rotational motion, Newton’s laws, torque, angular momentum and energy transfer. Nearly 300,000 people have taken it and it holds a 4.8.
Who is it right for? A student who already has the basics and wants to see where they show up in real objects.
Free courses on one physics topic
11. Understanding Einstein: The Special Theory of Relativity
Location: Online, on Coursera, taught by Stanford
Cost: Free, and Stanford’s own catalog lists it at $0.00. Only the graded certificate costs money
Dates: Self-paced, no fixed start
Application deadline: None
Eligibility: No prior experience required. Basic algebra helps, and a math review video opens the course
Two months at about 10 hours a week, eight modules, taught by Larry Randles Lagerstrom. You’ll work through the relativity of simultaneity, time dilation, the Lorentz factor and how E equals mc squared actually falls out of the argument. Most of the analysis is qualitative or semi-quantitative, which is why a 10th grader can follow it.
Who is it right for? Anyone curious about relativity who doesn’t want to be told they need calculus first.
12. Super-Earths and Life, HarvardX
Location: Online, on edX, taught by Harvard’s Department of Astronomy
Cost: Free to audit. The verified certificate is $149, one of the only certificate prices anyone on this page publishes
Dates: Self-paced, available anytime
Application deadline: None
Eligibility: Introductory level, no prerequisites
Fifteen weeks at five to eight hours a week, taught by Dimitar Sasselov and Colin Fredericks. It sits where astronomy, planetary science and biology meet: how we find planets around other stars, what makes one habitable, and what “life” would even mean somewhere else.
Who is it right for? A student who likes the big questions and wants a Harvard course they can actually get into.
13. Introduction to Astrophysics, EPFL
Location: Online, on edX, taught by École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Cost: Free to audit. The certificate price is not published on edX or on EPFL’s own platform, so don’t trust the figures floating around on course-aggregator sites
Dates: Self-paced. EPFL also hosts the course on its own platform with enrollment open
Application deadline: None
Eligibility: Not published. The content leans on trigonometry, derivatives and integrals, so this isn’t a no-math course
Measuring distances by parallax, Keplerian dynamics, black body spectra, how stars live and die, and where cosmology takes all of that. EPFL teaches it as a real physics course rather than a tour of pretty pictures.
Who is it right for? A student with solid math who wants astrophysics taught like physics.
14. Physics 101: Energy and Momentum, Rice University
Location: Online, on Coursera, taught by Rice University
Cost: Free to audit. Certificate price shown at checkout
Dates: Self-paced, with sessions restarting on a rolling basis
Application deadline: None
Eligibility: Coursera labels it intermediate. It uses vector analysis and some calculus, and strong algebra is assumed
Two weeks at about 10 hours a week, four modules, roughly 23 hours of content. Conservation of energy and momentum, work-energy relations, collisions, statics and elasticity.
Who is it right for? A student who’s done mechanics once and wants energy and momentum properly nailed down.
15. Exploring Quantum Physics, University of Maryland
Location: Online, on Coursera, taught by the University of Maryland
Cost: Free to audit. Certificate price shown at checkout, financial aid available
Dates: Self-paced with a flexible schedule. No start date is published, whatever older listings claim
Application deadline: None
Eligibility: No formal prerequisites are listed, but the course assumes integral calculus and classical mechanics. Treat it as advanced
Three weeks at about 10 hours a week, 10 modules, taught by Charles Clark and Victor Galitski. Quantum wells, Cooper pairs, oscillators, atomic structure and rotational spin.
Who is it right for? A senior with calculus and calculus-based physics who wants a genuine first look at quantum mechanics.
16. Particle Physics: an Introduction, University of Geneva
Location: Online, on Coursera, taught by the University of Geneva
Cost: Free to audit. Certificate price shown at checkout, financial aid available
Dates: Self-paced, flexible
Application deadline: None
Eligibility: No prerequisites are stated and no difficulty level is shown. The content is advanced
Four weeks at about 10 hours a week, eight modules, 60 assignments, taught by Martin Pohl and Anna Sfyrla. Both of them work on experiments at CERN. You’ll go through relativistic kinematics, the Standard Model, the Higgs boson, dark matter and dark energy.
Who is it right for? A student who already loves this stuff and wants it from people who work at CERN.
Frequently asked questions
No. None of the free courses on this page award high school or college credit. Saylor’s PHYS101 gives you 3.3 CEUs, which is a continuing-education unit, and Alison’s diploma is CPD-accredited, which US colleges don’t recognize. For real transferable credit you need a pre-college course you pay for, and most of the physics ones meet on campus rather than online.
For the content, yes. UNSW’s mechanics course and Saylor’s PHYS101 cover most of the AP Physics 1 syllabus, and working through either one before you take the class is a smart move. What they can’t do is register you for the exam or put an AP course on your transcript. Your school or a College Board approved provider handles that.
The learning is. The paperwork usually isn’t. You can audit every Coursera and edX course here for nothing. But graded assignments and the shareable certificate cost money, and neither platform prints the price any more. Saylor’s certificate is free. MIT OpenCourseWare doesn’t offer one at all.
It varies more than anything else on this page. UNSW’s mechanics course avoids calculus completely. Saylor teaches the small amount it needs inside the course. Delft wants derivatives and integrals up front. And Maryland’s quantum course and Geneva’s particle physics course both assume calculus, even though neither says so plainly. So check this before you enroll, not in week three.
Not properly. A few courses use simulations, and UNSW asks you to run small experiments with household objects. That’s the best of a limited set. But if lab work is what you’re after, look at an in-person summer program or find a local research lab.
That’s a different route, and a better one if you want work of your own to show. Start with our guides on how to get research opportunities in high school, how to find a research lab and tips on doing physics research in high school, then look at online research mentorship programs and free online research programs.
Which ones have deadlines, and when?
Only three of the 16. Everything else you can start today.
| Program | Deadline | Cycle |
|---|---|---|
| Stanford SPINWIP | Not published as a date. 2026 applicants heard back by June 10, 2026 | 2026 closed, 2027 not posted |
| Frontiers in Physics, Stanford | March 13, with financial aid by March 20 | 2026 closed, 2027 not posted |
| Horizon Academic Research Program | November 22, 2026 for the winter cohort | Open now |
Will an online physics course help my college application?
A finished course is a small, real signal. An unfinished one is nothing at all. But work of your own, a research paper or a project you can talk about, carries much further. Our guide on whether summer research programs actually help with college admissions goes through what admissions officers actually respond to.
Image source: Rice University