What benefits bring the online learning platforms?
Learning no longer stops at school or at university. On the contrary, with the online learning platforms available nowadays, it is just the beginning!
Learning doesn’t stop at any particular age; it is a continuous, life-long process of improving yourself. Every day.
Learning new skills is no longer an option. It is necessary to become successful. As industries now are developing so rapidly and rely more and more, each day on new technologies, online courses are an excellent way to develop new skills and keep up with the trends.
Though online learning may not appeal to everyone, a growing number of online learning platforms suggests that there is at least a strong interest in convenient, online learning options, many of which are study-at-your-own-pace. Nice, right?
One of the most distinct benefits of online learning platforms is that anyone can access it and create their own course catalog that fits their interests.
If you have a curious mind, this list of some of the best online learning platforms will help you challenge yourself and learn something new every single day. Check it out!
Best 30 online learning platforms for Millennials
1. Alison is a seven million-strong, global online learning community, filled with free, high-quality online education resources to help you develop essential, certified workplace skills. Whether you are seeking a new job, a promotion, a college place or starting a new business, ALISON empowers you to improve your economic and personal circumstances.
2. Khan Academy is a personalized learning resource for all ages, providing free video libraries, interactive challenges and assessments for students. Parents, coaches as well as teachers are able to keep track of what their student is learning. Khan Academy offers practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard in 36 languages that empower learners to study at their own pace in and outside of the classroom. They tackle math, science, computer programming, history, art history, economics, and more. They are partnering with institutions like NASA, The Museum of Modern Art, The California Academy of Sciences, and MIT to offer specialized content.
3. TED: TED’s mission is to spread ideas. Being a global community, they are welcoming people from every discipline and culture who seek a deeper understanding of the world. They passionately believe in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and, ultimately, the world. On TED.com, they’re building a clearinghouse of free knowledge from the world’s most inspired thinkers and a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other, both online and at TED and TEDx events around the world, all year long.
4. Coursera is an education platform that partners with top universities and organizations worldwide, to offer courses online for anyone to take. Coursera offers online courses for free from top universities all over the world. A wide range or courses are offered, including biology, mathematics, business, computer science, humanities and more. Those who are looking
5. Udacity was born out of a Stanford University experiment in which Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig offered their “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course online to anyone, for free. Over 160,000 students in more than 190 countries enrolled and not much later, Udacity was born. Now they are a growing team of educators and engineers on a mission to change the future of education by bridging the gap between real-world skills, relevant education, and employment.
6. Lynda is a leading online learning company that helps anyone learn business, software, technology and creative skills to achieve personal and professional goals. Through individual, corporate, academic and government subscriptions, members have access to the lynda.com video library of engaging, top-quality courses taught by recognized industry experts. The company also provides German, French and Spanish language content under the video2brain brand name.
7. FutureLearn’s mission is to pioneer the best social learning experiences for everyone, anywhere. This online learning platform offers a wide variety of courses from leading universities and internationally renowned organisations from around the world. The courses are delivered one step at a time, and are accessible everywhere: mobile, tablet and desktop, so you can fit learning around your life. FutureLearn offers you a powerful new way to learn online. Each course has been designed according to principles of effective learning, through storytelling, discussion, visible learning, and using community support to celebrate progress.
8. Saylor believes in “harnessing technology to make education free.” It is a great resource for learning through the free classes in a variety of subjects on their website. Saylor Academy’s mission is sustained by the continued evolution of an open educational ecosystem, and they are fully dedicated partners in this movement. Saylor’s commitment to the open education ecosystem is founded not just on open educational resources and open source learning technologies, but also on open access to credentials, and ongoing open learning opportunities.
9. GCF Learn Free For more than a decade, the GCFLearnFree.org program has helped millions around the world learn the essential skills they need to live and work in the 21st century. From Microsoft Office and email to reading, math, and more, GCFLearnFree.org offers 125 tutorials, including more than 1,100 lessons, videos, and interactives, completely free. If you’re willing to learn, they are ready to teach.
1p. Degreed exists to discover, empower, and recognize the next generation of the world’s expertise. With Degreed The lifelong learning platform, you can find, track, and measure ALL your learning.
11. CourseBuffet is The most organized Online Course Catalog, where you can search, find and compare hundreds of free online courses (MOOCs) from over 250 Universities from around the world.
12. Guides.co is a place where you can find Interactive, up-to-date, extremely useful and modern “How To” Guides.
Online Learning Platforms: OpenCourseWare
13. edX was founded by colleges and universities. They are the only leading MOOC provider that is both non-profit and open source. Open edX is the open-source platform that powers edX courses and is freely available. Whether you are interested in computer science, languages, engineering, psychology, writing, electronics, biology, or marketing, they have the course for you!
14. Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn. All lectures were recorded in the Yale College classroom and are available in video, audio, and text transcript formats. Registration is not required.
15. MIT OpenCourseWare: Their idea is to publish all of their course materials online and make them widely available to everyone, says Dick K.P. Yue, Professor, MIT School of Engineering. MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.
16. Harvard Extension School: At Harvard Extension School, free and open learning is hardly a new concept. In fact, the Extension School was founded with this mission in mind: to create an affordable way for any motivated student to take courses at Harvard. They stay true to this mission today, offering several free courses and over 700 for-credit courses at reasonable tuition rates.
17. Stanford Lagunita Online: Lagunita is Stanford’s instance of the open-source software release of the Open edX platform, which was developed by the joint Harvard/MIT non-profit organization, and which Stanford engineers have been collaborating on since April 2013. Lagunita hosts many of the free, online courses that are taught by Stanford faculty and made available to lifelong learners around the world for self-enrichment. Lagunita also hosts a variety of professional education opportunities in conjunction with many of Stanford University’s schools and departments.
Online Learning Platforms: IT Engineering and Coding
18. Code School – Learn by Doing! Code School teaches web technologies in the comfort of your browser with video lessons, coding challenges, and screencasts. They strive to help you learn by doing. Here you can find Interactive programming courses and coding challenges. Code School courses are organized into Paths based on technology. Navigate the learning Paths to find the right course for you.
19. CodeAcademy offers a variety of data science and software programming courses for various ages groups, with an in-browser coding console for some offerings. Codecademy is an education company, but not one in the way you might think. They are committed to building the best learning experience inside and out, making Codecademy the best place for our team to learn, teach, and create the online learning experience of the future.
20. Big Data University: Because skills are so vital, access to education is a right, not a privilege. Big Data University’s mission is to democratize access to practical skills for working with data. To do so, they needed to remove two big impediments: money and time. To that end, they have made everything that you need to learn free. Free courses, free access to all the tools, free data – free everything and not for a few days or weeks, but forever. Big Data University follows the “learn any time” delivery model. You can take as long as you need to complete these courses. Whether you are in between jobs or have school, two jobs, and a young baby, you can learn a new skill. And you can learn anywhere, as they call it: @Your Pace, @Your Place education.
21. KnowledgeNet offers a blend of effective training styles designed to leverage the benefits of traditional instructor-led training at your desktop. They have a unique approach to IT and business skills training supporting educational initiatives and ensuring that the acquisition of IT knowledge is relevant, topical, and useful. Not only their training solutions are less expensive than traditional ILT, internet delivery also eliminates the need for travel and related costs. The result? You can afford to take more instructor-led training courses, more often and anytime you please. The following CompTIA IT Certifications are available: Cisco Certification, Microsoft Certification, CompTIA Certification and Project Management Certification.
22. Gymnasium bridges the skills gap by taking what we’ve learned from our clients and developing free, online courses that teach digital designers and front-end developers today’s most in-demand skills.
23. Pluralsight have the mission to democratize professional technology learning. They believe everyone should have the opportunity to build a career they’re passionate about. They have gone beyond the traditional education model to put the power back in your hands because they believe that learning shouldn’t be confined to a classroom, rigorous schedule or select minority.
Online Learning Platforms: Development/Web design
24. HTML Dog is the web designer’s resource for everything HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, the most common technologies used in making web pages.
25. Hackdesign: Hackers are the modern-day Renaissance men and women who love to learn, explore, build, and take things apart. A hacker can make software do anything. Design can seem nuanced, subjective, and inaccessible sometimes, but they’re working on this project to help change that. They have curated the best and most useful blogs, books, games, videos, and tutorials that helped them learn critical elements of design and they’re organizing them all into a digestible and iterative lesson plan so you can apply this knowledge to your own projects.
26. SitePoint is a hub for web developers to share their passion for building incredible Internet things. Founded by Mark Harbottle and Matt Mickiewicz in 1999, SitePoint is for web professionals, by web professionals: developers, designers, programmers, product creators and entrepreneurs alike.
27. Skillscrush is an interactive online learning community for creatives, thinkers, and makers. Looking for a more lucrative and fulfilling job, to design new products, or even to kickstart a new venture? This is the right place – Skillscrush is here to help you demystify technology and help you completely transform your career.
28. Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) is an evolving learning platform for Web technologies and the software that powers the Web. MDN’s mission is simple: to provide complete, accurate, and helpful documentation for everything about the open Web, whether it’s supported by Mozilla-built software or not. If it’s an open technology exposed to the Web, they want to document it. In addition, they provide documentation about how to build and contribute to Mozilla projects and about Firefox OS and Web app development.
29. Google Developers is a topic-narrow amazing source of documentation and tutorials for Android app development.
30. Apple Developer is very specific in topics for lessons, but it’s a free source of documentation and tutorials for software developers who want to develop apps for iOS Mobile, Mac OS X desktop, and Safari Web apps.
Have you tried any of these online learning platforms yourself? Would you recommend us any other learning tools we could share? Let us know in the comment section below.
For more business tips, check our entrepreneurship section and subscribe to our weekly newsletters.