Advice on effectiveness of online courses.

I wanted to know your opinions on how effective or useful taking online courses are.

The ones I found are free, so have nothing to lose and I am sure will learn a good deal (I assume), but I want to know if such things count as experience when I apply for jobs?

In my internship, I had to develop a new tool in FORTRAN, so basically I have no experience with using any commercial tools (but an year of writing code in FORTRAN), so I looked for some online courses. But is it a good idea to list them as experience? What is the opinion of people in the industry about these online course?

Thank you.