Stanford Medicine Offers Courses with Free Certificate & CME Credit

Pat’s certificate for Stanford’s Gut Check – How the Microbiome Shapes CAR-T Therapy Outcomes

Stanford Medicine offers a large number of medical online learning resources, including podcasts, webinars, and courses with free certificates of completion.

Learners have access to a formal transcript from Stanford, listing all the training they’ve completed. And if you work in healthcare, you can earn continuing medical education credit (CME credit).

In this Class Central article, we discuss the free online learning opportunities offered by Stanford in the medical field.

Platform & Audience

Stanford Medicine is the umbrella organization that encompasses, among others, the Stanford School of Medicine and Medical Center.

Besides overseeing the university’s on-campus education and in-hospital training, Stanford Medicine has an online platform for continuing medical education (CME).

The platform is geared toward both:

Healthcare professionals, such as physicians and nurses, since it offers accredited learning resources that can carry continuing medical education credit (CME credit)
The public at large, since it doesn’t actually require a medical affiliation to access the learning content. Lifelong learners are welcome.

Offerings: Podcasts to Courses

Interestingly, the platform isn’t just a catalog of online courses. It includes other resources, such on-demand webinars and podcasts. (It also lists paid offerings, such as symposiums, but we won’t focus on those here.)

For example, here are some of the free resources available on the platform:

Podcasts: The Stanford Medcast, a biweekly 30-minute medical podcast. Each episode focuses on a new topic, often related to recent medical developments. For instance, recent episodes have discussed CRISPR Breakthroughs, CAR-T Therapy, Dermatology, and Perinatal Mental Health
Here’s a webinar from the Pediatric Orthopedics and Sports Medicine Lecture Series that focuses on Fatigue and Underperformance in Sport, one on Common Causes and Treatments of Depression in Children and Adolescents, and one from Cardiology Grand Rounds: Stress CMR Imaging of Chest Pain Syndromes
Lecture Series: Such as this series (reviewed in May 2025) on Multiple Sclerosis that includes an interactive learning module, recorded webinars, and podcasts
Online Courses: For example Health Across the Gender Spectrum.

Free Certificates & Credit

My (Manoel’s) transcript, listing all the offerings I’ve completed. As you can see, I took part as a *non-physician*.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect (at least for those that have kept up with developments in online education), is that all the offerings listed above include a free certificate of completion. Ten years ago, this was common in online education. Now, certificates are typically paywalled.

Things may be a bit different in medicine. Indeed, lifelong learning is essential in healthcare, since the field moves fast and lives are on the line. As a result, in many countries, the need for lifelong learning has been codified into the bylaws of healthcare professions.

For instance, in the US, almost all states ask physicians to take part in continuing medical education (CME) activities yearly and accrue a certain number of CME credits. This constant need for recredentialing may explain the perennity of free certificates in healthcare.

Luckily, on the Stanford Medicine platform, when certificates are free, they’re free for everybody, whether you’re in healthcare or not. The only difference is that if you work in healthcare, your certificates will carry CME credit. If you don’t work in healthcare, you’ll still get a certificate, but no credit.

In addition, what’s even less common, you’ll have access to a transcript from Stanford, showing all the courses you’ve taken and the CME credit you’ve earned. You can see my (Manoel’s) transcript above.

How to Earn Free Certificate & Credit

Example of how to claim your certificate and credit

If you’d like to learn via the Stanford Medicine platform, earn free certificates, and potentially earn continuing medical education credit (CME credit), here’s what you should do:

Sign up on Stanford Medicine. At this step, you’ll specify your profession, which will determine whether your certificates will entail CME credit or not
Browse the catalog. Unfortunately, you can’t filter by “Free”. But if you select “On-Demand Activities” in the Activity Type filter, you’ll find plenty of open resources with free certificates and CME credit. Check that the course dates have not expired if you want a certificate and credit. You may still be able to watch the course videos on YouTube, but will not receive CME credit or a certificate if the dates have passed
Enroll, claim your certificate & credit. Once you finish an offering, claim your certificate and credit via the offering’s catalog page itself, as you can see above. In some cases, you’ll need to complete an assessment to unlock the certificate. You’ll then receive the certificate by email, or you can download it via this page while logged in to Stanford Medicine. Make sure you download your certificates before they disappear in 1-3 months.