Learn
For Golden Bears, knowledge is a lifelong pursuit.
Your time as a student at Berkeley may be over, but your access to world-class educational content from campus faculty and lecturers continues! From one-day seminars to semester-long courses, in-person to online, alums like you can participate in a wide variety of learning opportunities to enrich cultural lives or advance career goals.
Are you an adventurous learner age 50+? The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (“OLLI”) at UC Berkeley is a fee-based membership community of inquisitive adults with a passion for exploration, engagement, and connection. Featuring online and in-person courses, lectures, workshops, and events, OLLI offers its members deep and enriching dives into history, politics, literature, music, current affairs, and more — all taught by Cal faculty and other distinguished scholars.
Offering 2,000+ courses across 70+ programs in professional and creative fields, UC Berkeley Extension’s continuing education can help you start, improve, or change your career, prepare for graduate school, earn a professional certificate, or complete undergraduate coursework with transferable credits. From full-time, semester-long, in-person programs to weeklong bootcamps to individual online classes, Extension has offerings for nearly everyone.
Exclusively for UC Berkeley alumni, the university’s Office of Alumni Relations is pleased to be able to periodically offer select courses, free of charge, in a self-paced, asynchronous, online format. Past topics have included the history of the civil rights movement; extreme politics; and food, culture, and the environment. Courses are for personal enrichment, with no academic credit or certificate of completion.
Focusing primarily on topics of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), this collection of articles, podcasts, and videos are sourced from class readings, students, and Haas faculty in order to provide helpful and educational information to Berkeley alumni, regardless of where they are in their DEI journey. Please note that a CalNet ID and password is required to register. (Don’t have one? Claim yours today.)
Cal Discoveries Travel tours are designed for adults interested in the educational and cultural aspects of travel. Dive deep into a destination with the help of the enrichment lecturers who accompany many tours, and informative local lectures from tour operators. Make new Cal connections, rekindle old ones, and delight in the enduring bond of your fellow Golden Bears throughout your trip! Requires a current, paid membership with the Cal Alumni Association.
Do you like discussing books with other smart people? Are you looking for a way to connect to fellow alumni that’s not reliant on schedules or geographic location? Join the Berkeley Alumni Virtual Book Club! We read a different book every two months, engaging with one another in an online forum where a professional book club manager provides discussion questions and thematic prompts. And it’s free!