One of the biggest benefits of the Internet is the huge amount of information we all have available at our fingertips.
Whether you’re five or ninety five, the internet has a lot to offer. Particularly when the topic is education, the resources on the internet are endless. Best of all, many high quality sites are completely free.
Here are some sites that are used for online learning or education. Top 10 sites that are going to help you in your professional life.
So here we go:-
1. Coursera:-
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| source:lifehack.org |
Coursera is an online learning platform founded by Stanford professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller that offers massive open online courses (MOOC), specializations, and degrees.Coursera works with universities and other organizations to offer online courses, specializations, and degrees in a variety of subjects, such as engineering, humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences, mathematics, business, computer science, digital marketing, data science, and others.As of June 2018, Coursera had more than 33 million registered users and more than 2,400 courses.Coursera was founded in 2012 by Stanford University computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. Ng and Koller were inspired by their experiences offering their Stanford courses online in fall 2011, and soon after left Stanford to launch Coursera. Princeton, Stanford, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania were the first universities to offer content on the platform.Offerings have since expanded to include Specializations – collections of courses that build skills in a specific subject – as well as degrees and a workforce development product for businesses and government organizations.Coursera courses last approximately four to ten weeks, with one to two hours of video lectures a week. These courses provide quizzes, weekly exercises, peer-graded assignments, and sometimes a final project or exam. Courses are also provided on-demand, in which case users can take their time in completing the course with all of the material available at once. As of May 2015 Coursera offered 104 on-demand courses.As of 2017 Coursera offers full master's degrees. They first started with Master's in Innovation and Entrepreneurship (OMIE) from HEC Paris and Master's of Accounting (iMSA) from the University of Illinois, but have moved on to offer Master of Computer Science in Data Science and Master of Business Administration (iMBA), both from University of Illinois.
2. Khan Academy:-
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| source:lifehack.org |
Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization created in 2008 by Salman Khanwith the goal of creating a set of online tools that help educate students. The organization produces short lessons in the form of videos.Its website also includes supplementary practice exercises and materials for educators. All resources are available for free to users of the website. The website and its content are provided mainly in English, but is also available in other languages including Armenian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, Georgian, German, Gujarati, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian and European), Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, and Turkish.The organization started in 2008 when Salman Khan tutored one of his cousins in mathematics on the Internet using a service called Yahoo! Doodle Images.[10] After a while, Khan's other cousins began to use his tutoring service. Due to the demand, Khan decided to make his videos watchable on the Internet, so he published his content on YouTube.[11] Later, he used a drawing application called SmoothDraw, and now uses a Wacom tablet to draw using ArtRage. Tutorials are recorded on the computer.The positive responses prompted Khan to quit his job in 2009, and focus on the tutorials (then released under the name Khan Academy) full-time.Khan Lab School, a school founded by Sal Khan and associated with Khan Academy, opened on September 15, 2014 in Mountain View, California. In June 2017, Khan Academy launched Financial Literacy Video Series for college graduates, job seekers and young professionals.Khan Academy's website aims to provide a personalized learning experience, mainly built on the videos which are hosted on YouTube. The website is meant to be used as a supplement to its videos, because it includes other features such as progress tracking, practice exercises, and teaching tools. The material can also be accessed through mobile applications.The videos display a recording of drawings on an electronic blackboard, which are similar to the style of a teacher giving a lecture. The narrator describes each drawing and how they relate to the material being taught. Non-profit groups have distributed offline versions of the videos to rural areas in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.Videos range from all subjects covered in school and for all grades from kindergarten up to high school. The Khan Academy website also hosts content from educational YouTube channels and organizations such as Crash Course and the Museum of Modern Art. It also provides online courses for preparing for standardized tests, including the SAT and MCAT and released LSAT preparation lessons in 2018.In July 2017, Khan Academy became the official practice partner for the College Board's Advanced Placement.
3.Udacity:-
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| source:google.com |
Udacity, Inc. is a for-profit educational organization founded by Sebastian Thrun, David Stavens, and Mike Sokolsky offering massive open online courses (MOOCs).
According to Thrun, the origin of the name Udacity comes from the company's desire to be "audacious for you, the student". While it originally focused on offering university-style courses, it now focuses more on vocational courses for professionals.
Udacity is the outgrowth of free computer science classes offered in 2011 through Stanford University. Thrun has stated he hopes half a million students will enroll, after an enrollment of 160,000 students in the predecessor course at Stanford, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence,and 90,000 students had enrolled in the initial two classes as of March 2012. Udacity was announced at the 2012 Digital Life Design conference. Udacity is funded by venture capital firm, Charles River Ventures, and $200,000 of Thrun's personal money. In October 2012, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitzled the investment of another $15 million in Udacity. In November 2013, Thrun announced in a Fast Company article that Udacity had a "lousy product" and that the service was pivoting to focus more on vocational courses for professionals and "nanodegrees." As of 28 April 2014, Udacity has 1.6 million users in 12 full courses and 26 free courseware.
In 2014, the Georgia Institute of Technology launched the first "massive online open degree" in computer science by partnering with Udacity and AT&T; a complete master's degree through that program costs students $7,000.
In October 2017, Udacity along with Unity, launched ‘Learn ARKit’ program which could help the developers improve their AR application building skills. In the same month, Google partners with Udacity to launch a new scholarship initiative for aspiring Web and Android application developers. While not yet profitable as of February 2018, Udacity is valued at over $1B USD having raised $163M USD from noted investors included Andreessen Horowitz, Drive Capital, and Alphabet’s venture capital arm, GV.
Free courses[edit]
The first two courses on Udacity started on 20 February 2012, entitled "CS 101: Building a Search Engine", taught by David Evans from the University of Virginia, and "CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car" taught by Thrun. Both courses use Python.
Four more courses began on 16 April 2012, encompassing a range of ability and subject matter, with teachers including Steve Huffmanand Peter Norvig. Five new courses were announced on 31 May 2012, and marked the first time Udacity offered courses outside the domain of computer science. Four of these courses launched at the start of the third "hexamester", on 25 June 2012. One course, Logic & Discrete Mathematics: Foundations of Computing, was delayed for several weeks before an email announcement was sent out on 14 August stating that the course would not be launched, although no further explanation was provided.
On 23 August 2012, a new course in entrepreneurship, EP245 taught by retired serial entrepreneur Steve Blank, was announced. Four new specialized CS courses were announced as part of collaboration with Google, Nvidia, Microsoft, Autodesk, Cadence Design Systems, and Wolfram Research on 18 October 2012, to be launched in early 2013. On 28 November 2012, Thrun's original AI-class from 2011 was relaunched as a course at Udacity, CS271.
University credit courses[edit]
Udacity announced a partnership with San Jose State University (SJSU) on 15 January 2013 to pilot three new courses--two algebra courses and an introductory statistics course (ST095)--available for college credit at SJSU for the Spring 2013 semester and offered entirely online. 300 SJSU students had the opportunity to enroll for 3 units of college credit at a fixed cost of $150. Additionally, like other MOOCs, anyone could enroll anytime for free.
This first pilot resulted in pass rates below the traditional in-person SJSU class for all three courses. One hypothesis was that many of the students who had enrolled online had already taken and failed the traditional course, and therefore were likely to fail again. The pilot was repeated in the summer semester with an increased enrollment cap of 1000. In addition, the pilot was expanded to include two new courses, Intro to Programming (CS046) and General Psychology (PS001). This time, pass rates for the statistics, college algebra, and programming courses exceeded those of the traditional face-to-face course.
Despite this, the partnership was suspended on 18 July 2013.
Nanodegree[edit]
In June 2014, Udacity and AT&T announced the "Nanodegree" program, designed to teach programming skills needed to qualify for an entry-level IT position at AT&T. The coursework is said to take less than a year to complete, and cost about US$200/month. AT&T said it will offer paid internships to some graduates of the program.[38][39]“We can’t turn you into a Nobel laureate,” Mr. Thrun said to a learner. “But what we can do is something like upskilling — you’re a smart person, but the skills you have are inadequate for the current job market, or don’t let you get the job you aspire to have. We can help you get those skills.”[40]
4. Udemy:-
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| source:lifehack.org |
Udemy.com is an online learning platform. It is aimed at professional adults. Unlike academic massive open online course (MOOC) programs which are driven by traditional collegiate coursework, Udemy uses content from online content creators to sell for profit. Udemy provides tools which enable users to create a course, promote it and earn money from student tuition charges.
No Udemy courses are currently credentialed for college credit; students take courses largely as a means of improving job-related skills.[3] Some courses generate credit toward technical certification. Udemy has made a special effort to attract corporate trainers seeking to create coursework for employees of their company.
As of 2018, there are more than 100,000 courses on the website.
Udemy serves as a platform that allows instructors to build online courses on topics of their choosing. Using Udemy's course development tools they can upload video, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, audio, zip files and live classes to create courses. Instructors can also engage and interact with users via online discussion boards.
Courses are offered across a breadth of categories, including business and entrepreneurship, academics, the arts, health and fitness, language, music, and technology. Most classes are in practical subjects such as Excel software or using an iPhonecamera. Udemy also offers Udemy for Business, enabling businesses access to a targeted suite of over 2,000 training courses on topics from digital marketing tactics to office productivity, design, management, programming, and more. With Udemy for Business, organizations can also create custom learning portals for corporate training.[18]
Udemy offers paid and free courses, depending on the instructor. In 2015, the top 10 instructors made more than $17 million in total revenue.
In April 2013, Udemy offered an app for Apple iOS, allowing students to take classes directly from iPhones;[20] The Android version was launched in January 2014. As of January 2014, the iOS app had been downloaded over 1 million times, and 20 percent of Udemy users access their courses via mobile. In July 2016, Udemy expanded their iOS platform to include Apple TV.
5. iTunes U
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| source:lifehack.org |
iTunes U is a dedicated section of Apple's iTunes Music Store that features educational audio and video files from universities, museums and public media organizations for free download to PCs and mobile devices. iTunes U allows a visitor to search, download and play educational content in the same way that they can manipulate songs, podcasts, television shows and movies. Participating institutions include Stanford, UC Berkeley, University of Melbourne, Texas A&M, MIT, Yale, Trinity College Dublin and many more. The Beyond Campus section of iTunes U also delivers programming from American Public Media, PBS, the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian.
To use the service, a user is required to download and install iTunes on an Internet-connected PC and then visit the iTunes Store. The user may also visit the relevant subdomain of a participating university, like http://itunes.stanford.edu. From there, her or she can go directly to the institution's homepage on iTunes U. The visitor can then select entire courses or choose individual video or audio recordings, ebooks or PDFs. The material can then either be watched directly on the PC or synchronized onto a portable media player for mobile learning. Educators can use the service to upload coursework and lectures for easy distribution on a platform that students are generally already competent navigating.
In the year since its introduction, iTunes U has logged over 4 million downloads, though Apple will not release precise statistics to anyone other than participating universities and organizations. The introduction of a wireless version of the iTunes Store for iPhones and iPod Touches means that students can now download coursework on-demand directly from connected mobile devices. This ability to access coursework wirelessly will further redefine paradigms for virtual classrooms and distributed online learning.
Critics point out that only large, well-funded institutions like Stanford, Berkeley or MIT can afford to digitize courseware for distribution on a large scale. The courses available also have spotty coverage across the various curricula, depending upon how active instructors have been in making content available. The quality of the courses available are also largely dependent on the preparation and training of individual teachers, especially in creating video for small iPod screens or capturing live discussions for syndication.
6. Fun Brain:-
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| source:google.com |
FunBrain is an educational browser game website for children and adults. It was on this site that Diary of a Wimpy Kid was first published before being turned into a successful book series and movie franchise.The website was founded in May 1992 and is owned by Poptropica Worldwide; a division of Family Education Network. The current publisher is Jess Brallier. The company said the site has 65,000 teachers registered, 35 million visits per month, and 60,000 page visits per day, and provides mathematics and kid style games.
7. MIT OpenCourseWare:-
MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to publish all of the educational materials from its undergraduate – and graduate-level courses online, freely and openly available to anyone, anywhere. MIT OpenCourseWare is a large-scale, web-based publication of MIT course materials. The project was announced on April 4, 2001[1] and uses Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. The program was originally funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MIT. Currently, MIT OpenCourseWare is supported by MIT, corporate underwriting, major gifts, and donations from site visitors.[2] The initiative has inspired more than 250 other institutions to make their course materials available as open educational resources through the Open Education Consortium.[3]
As of May 2018, over 2,400 courses were available online. While a few of these were limited to chronological reading lists and discussion topics, a majority provided homework problems and exams (often with solutions) and lecture notes. Some courses also included interactive web demonstrations in Java, complete textbooks written by MIT professors, and streamingvideo lectures.
MIT OCW was originally served by a custom content management system based on Microsoft's Content Management Server, which was replaced in mid-2010 with a Plone-based content management system. The publishing process is described by MIT as a "large-scale digital publishing infrastructure consists of planning tools, a content management system (CMS), and the MIT OpenCourseWare content distribution infrastructure".[7]
Video content for the courses were originally primarily in RealMedia format. In 2008, OCW transitioned to using YouTube as the primary digital video streaming platform for the site, embedding YouTube video back into the OCW site.[8] OCW video and audio files are also provided in full for offline downloads on iTunesU and the Internet Archive. In 2011, OCW introduced an iPhone App called LectureHall in partnership with Irynsoft.[9]
8. Codecademy:-
Codecademy is an online interactive platform that offers free coding classes in 12 different programming languages including Python, Java, JavaScript (jQuery, AngularJS, React.js), Ruby, SQL, C++, and Sass, as well as markup languages HTML and CSS.[4][5] The site also offers a paid "pro" option that gives users access to a personalized learning plan, quizzes, realistic projects, and live help from advisors.[
The platform also provides courses for learning command line and Git.[4] In September 2015, Codecademy, in partnership with Periscope, added a series of courses designed to teach SQL, the predominant programming language for database queries.[18] In October 2015, Codecademy created a new course, a class on Java programming. As of January 2014, the site had over 24 million users who had completed over 100 million exercises.[19][20][21] The site has received positive reviews from the New York Times[22] and TechCrunch.[23]
As part of the Computer Science Education Week held in December 2013, Codecademy launched their first iOS app called "Hour of Code". The app focuses on the basics of programming, including the same content from the website.
9. edX:-
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| source:lifehack.org |
Another great option for free online education is edX. Also bringing together courses from many different schools, the site has impressive, quality information for everyone. edX covers a great range of topics.
edX is a massive open online course (MOOC) provider. It hosts online university-level courses in a wide range of disciplines to a worldwide student body, including some courses at no charge. It also conducts research into learning based on how people use its platform. EdX is a nonprofit organization and runs on the free Open edX open-source softwareplatform.[4]
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University created edX in May 2012. More than 70 schools, nonprofit organizations, and corporations offer or plan to offer courses on the edX website.[5] As of 29 December 2017, edX has around 14 million students taking more than 1,800 courses online.
10. Open Culture Online Courses:-
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| source:lifehack.org |
If you are struggling to find exactly the material you are looking for, try Open Culture’s listing of free online education courses. The page highlights 1000 lectures, videos and podcasts from universities around the world. The site features a lot of material found only on universities private sites, all in easy to browse categories. This means you can find hundreds of university courses, without having to visit and search each university’s own site. Open Culture’s list features courses from England, Australia, Wales and many state universities around the United States. A very helpful resource for finding many courses in one area of study.
is one of the best free cultural and educational media sites on the Internet. The website was founded in 2006 by Dan Coleman, who is the Director and Associate Dean of Stanford University’s Continuing Education Program. Though Open Culture is not affiliated with Stanford, it seems to be well suited to providing intelligent, relevant information. In keeping with the theme of relevancy, Open Culture can be followed on Twitter, Facebook and you can subscribe to the site to receive regular updates through email as well.
The setup of the website is akin to a blog style website with multiple posts that make the front page everyday. Each one provides a bite sized taste of what the website has to offer. Open Culture has information and resources that touch on nearly every knowledge base. Along the top and right hand side of the site are links to the various resources the website provides. This is where the real strength of the website shines through.
For anyone who thought learning a language was too pricy an attempt will be glad to know that Open Culture provides links to free lessons for Bulgarian and Hindi and nearly everything in between. Audiobooks, movies and college courses are also offered, free of charge. While the textbooks seem to be available online only, everything else is available for download or through iTunes. Open Culture operates on a simple premise, to find and organize free, high quality, intelligent media. The result is an exemplary collection of the best of what the Internet has to offer. Each resource provided here shouldn’t be thought of as just a free link, but an opportunity to learn something new.
So these are the sites for learning free online courses.
That's all for today,
Thank You!
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