Ever since the development of the internet began, various persons have been using it for educational purposes, from sharing of academic documents, to uploading educational videos to solve math problems or a foreign language! Today’s generation of children constantly look out of the box, and are interested to learn a lot more than what is taught in their schools. The internet, with its entirety of educational websites, yields to this need of the young generation. While most of these websites offer courses at some fee, there are a few which offer some courses for free, those which naturally are more sought after these days.
Here are 6 educational websites where you can learn for free:
1. Khan Academy
Although Khan Academy is popular for its math courses, they do offer coaching for science, economics, history and even computer science! Their simple and fun interface appeals even to the kindergarteners. The website has content for grades 1 through 12, and a few for undergraduates. The website has ties with MIT, Stanford and NASA so that the content delivered to the students is of high quality, and comes directly from research. What’s more, is that all these top notch courses, are completely free, and you can learn at your own pace!
2. Coursera
Coursera is more popular amongst under graduates and post graduates. They essentially offer courses online, that are taught in reputed universities across the world. From CMU, to John Hopkins- one can learn directly from the teachers at those universities, via the internet through video lectures and hands on practice! Coursera gives out these courses for free, unless one wants to be certified. If you want a certificate of completing the course successfully, there is some fee involved.
3. MIT OpenCourseWare
The idea of this website came about when teachers at MIT realized that aspiring students, who are unable to get into MIT, shouldn’t lose out on the lectures taught there. The site has several videos, of actual lectures taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for everyone to see and learn! They also have simple courses you can take up, which can be done in about a week! Some of these courses are much in-depth, which are taught over a semester- which you can follow through their RSS feeds. They also have online webinars frequently, so you can communicate with their professors live over the internet.
4. Udemy
Many would say you would find Udemy to be similar to Coursera, but this is far from true. Udemy allows you to customize your learning plans, by combining courses, adding lessons from other courses into your plan, and also build your own course from existing lessons! This personal touch to your lessons is what has made this website quite renowned, even though it has a mixture of paid and free lectures. These lectures are available worldwide, in up to 35 languages!
5. EdX
EdX has collaborations with multiple schools, institutes and universities, due to which it has a huge database of a variety of courses. You can find information for any course here- even a practical one on using tools for the art of cutting chains! (if you don’t have one yet, you could try here)
The website does indeed have an enormous range of subjects to choose from, most of which is completely free. Professors too, use this website as reference to build their own courses for their universities.
6. iTunes U
Who knew you could learn school’s subjects through your iPod! Most kids these days have at least one Apple product, because of which this was taken into an advantage to create iTunes U, a center for free online education for all those who have an iPad, iPod, Mac or iPhone- via the iTunes music app! The app offers video lectures and podcasts, most of which are entirely available for free. There are a medley of subjects available, which are covered extensively. Even with its high quality lectures, this app isn’t as popular as the others, as it cannot run on Windows or Android. Nevertheless it is highly recommended for those that own an Apple device.
