Education
TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, or PUBG…
If you think you have had enough of all that and now intend to invest the time to engage with something more productive, internet brings you endless opportunities.
You can educate yourself with those courses at the ease of your home—all for free; what you need is an internet connected PC or a smart phone and of course time.
One way is to enrol for free online courses from the world-class universities, including Harvard and MIT.
All you need to do is to cut back a few hours from addictive scrolling.
There are more than 160 member universities listed in edX, a non-profit organisation jointly developed by MIT and Harvard in 2012. These universities offer well over 3000 learning/academic courses ranging from one week courses like Fundamentals of market structure to over 12 weeks courses like the CS50 from Harvard.
Any Caveats?
While these courses provide you with competent knowledge comparable to similar courses from, say, one of those Ivy Leagues, the only downside is that most of their courses are still unaccredited, there are few courses those are credited but most of those accredited courses require additional cost to unlock or what they call ‘auditing’.
There are programs like Bachelors, Micro Bachelors and Micro Masters but those only offered by universities not much renowned as Ivy Leagues.
You will also be missing the real university experience and the exposure that you will be getting from universities. However, they have tried to build a community of like-minded learners by offering a group chat.
There are tiers available in the package offered by edX: free and free to 'audit'. Auditing here means, you can take the course for free, but there is a cost to upgrade for additional content and/or to get a verified certificate, which ranges from $50 to $300.
What can you learn?
Unless you are trying to learn something as exotic as alchemy, there are plenty of courses in almost all subject areas.
edX itself is a non-profit organization that is working to ‘democratise education’ and currently offers 3000 plus courses, many of those courses are directly sourced from the world’s top universities.
These universities are well known for their extremely low acceptance rate; it ranges to low single digit for most of these Ivy Leagues.
Artificial Intelligence, Neuro Science, Programming, Data Science, Architecture, Engineering, Arts and Culture to game development to name a few, those are all available—for free.
So, is this the edX advertisement?
No, this is not.
But considering all the competitors to edX, it offers good quality contents; however small course varieties, these are the cream contents.
But there are other alternatives to edX as well, if you have got different taste. Those platforms include: Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, Udemy, freeCodeCamp, Odin Project—to mention a few.
The high school students and the test-takers of SAT, ACT, and so on can be benefitted by the course contents of Khan Academy. It is also a not-for-profit organisation, run by donations, which offers excellent high school level materials all for free. They are also official partner for collegeboard preparation materials, the institute behind SAT.
If you want to excel in data science, artificial intelligence and in general, programming, these online courses are much effective compared to physical sciences because subjects in sciences and mathematics may require practical labs.
You might find it difficult to directly jump into CS50 programming, without having a root in computer science. So, future programmers can be benefited with the courses on freeCodeCamp and Odin Project which teaches from scratch.
freeCodeCamp, even boasts more than 40,000 of their graduates have joined to companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Spotify and so on. It may be easier to get a job, as you can get certified after completing the course and building a project.
Similarly, Odin Project gives great courses on developing various projects. One who is trying to build something in software world will be benefited a lot from Odin’s courses.
So, who are these courses for?
These courses are for anyone who want to upskill themselves.
Students can broaden and brush-up their knowledge in their field, as I did during my exams for 4th year Quantum Mechanics of Bachelors of Physics.
It will also be helpful for people who want to develop cross disciplinary knowledge for certain purpose such as: a programmer who wants to develop accounting app need to get some knowledge of accounting.
Either way, this is win-win situation for anyone who is seeking quality education for free.
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