More than 100 Free Places to Learn Online – and Counting

by Jeff Cobb

I’ve been a fan of open education for some time and recently have been intrigued by the revival of the “free” business model debate by Chris Anderson and Kevin Kelly, among others. So, conflating the two, I decided to undertake what turned into a “pulling a thread on a sweater” exercise and see how many free places to learn things I could find on the Web relatively quickly. I’ve included some notes and observations on this exercise below, but first I’ll cut to the chase and offer a brief table of contents for what follows:

Now for the notes and observations:
First, this is obviously nowhere near a comprehensive list. There are who knows how many sites out there, and for the purposes of this post, I have confined myself to sites that offer relatively formalized learning experiences and state this as their explicit purpose. Truth is, there is almost no place on the Web where you can learn something.

Next, I made an effort to categorize things in a relatively logical way below and even to start a key of sorts:

  • T – Text-based offerings (usually with still graphics)
  • A – Audio without Video
  • V – Video offerings
  • I – Interactive
  • C – Offered as customer education, i.e. part of a corporate marketing strategy or as a way to promote sales of other products.

I clearly have no future as a librarian, however, as I finally felt like I had to give up on pursuing this and go back to earning a living, spending time with my family, etc. Perhaps I will manage to fill it over time. (Or kind readers can share their knowledge of these sites in the comments.) If I do continue to do more with this, it is probably better suited for a wiki anyway.

Finally, the main point to all of this is simply that there is so much available out there for free—even things that offer credit—and given how easy it is for non-technical subject matter experts to contribute content, it will only keep growing. Quality is all over the place right now, but I suspect competition among aggregators and the growing influence of the open education movement will drive higher quality over time. All of this suggests at least a couple of things, in my opinion:

  • If part of your business strategy is to generate revenue from learning experiences provided to members, customers, or students and you haven’t yet considered how “free” impacts you, it’s high time.
  • “Free” learning could potentially be one of the better forms of customer engagement in the world of the new Web—though this does not come without issues, as Stephen Downes and Lisa Neal have pointed out in a recent issue of eLearn Magazine.

The list follows. Please let me know any major gaps you see, and it would be great to hear from readers about how “free” fits into their organization’s strategy for learning. Also, let me know any sites you think need to be listed here.

Jeff Cobb
Mission to Learn

If you enjoy what you read here on Mission to Learn, I encourage you to subscribe to the RSS feed or use the e-mail subscription form at the top right side of this page.

Online Tutorials and How-to Sites

There are starting to be quite a lot of these sites and you have to wonder just how many can manage to stay in business. Still, I think a probable upside of all the competition will be an increase in expectations and the resulting quality of the offerings.

“Big Idea” and Debate Sites

Big Think is the newest entrant here. I am sure there are other sites like this that I don’t yet know about. These are places where you can see some of your favorite gurus being gurus and add your two cents.

Higher Education and Open Education Initiatives

This list won’t come close to doing justice to what is going on out there in the world of open education, but suffice to say that between universities, NGOs, and foundation funded projects, there is practically nothing that you can’t learn online, and in many cases, take the underlying intellectual property and re-configure it to your own needs under an Creative Commons or other “copyleft” license.

Free CE,CME, and CEU

I could post another 100 links just in this area alone. It is tricky terrain though. You have to pay attention to the fine print that tells you things like when the availability of credit expires or whether just the course/article content and not the credit (or vice-versa) is free. Particularly in the health arena, most of the “free” CE tends to be sponsored by pharmaceutical companies and medical supply manufacturers–not necessarily a bad thing, but something to keep in mind. Health-related CE also tends to be some of the less-inspired learning out there–often, for instance, credit is attached to nothing more than a journal article.

Topical Areas

All of the above links are for destinations where a wide variety of topics are covered, but there are also any number of Web sites or YouTube videos covering a single topic or a handful of related topics. The list below is admittedly a fairly eclectic collection of examples.

At Home

Business and Professional Skills

Dance

Economics

Handy Things to Know

Health

Human Resources

International Development

Language, Spelling, and Grammar Skills

Law

Math and Science

Music and Art

Sports, Recreation, and Hobbies

Theological

Web and Computer Skills

If you liked this post, you might also like:

More than 50 Web Widgets for Your Learning Mix

And you might also want to ask What is e-learning?

Related posts:

  1. Learn to Save a Life: 10 Free Online First Aid Resources
  2. Top 10 Free Health & Medical Open Courseware Collections
  3. Where to Find Free Computer Programming Education Online
  4. 35+ Free Online Business Education Sites
  5. 25 Free Online Resources and Web Apps for Lifelong Learners

posted on February 14, 2008

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Tagged as: e-learning, free, Free & Open, OER, online learning

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{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }

Wayne Mackintosh February 14, 2008 at 5:50 pm

Wayne here from WikiEducator at the Commonwealth of Learning — a non-profit intergovernmental agency.

Wow that’s an impressive resource! Just a quick note — if any readers are interested in free wiki skills training — WikiEducator is running a series free training workshops under the Learning4Content project.

Folk register online:

http://wikieducator.org/Learning4Content

Ian Grove-Stephensen February 15, 2008 at 11:01 pm

What a list!

But….you could have a whole wardrobe full of sweaters to pull here if you add all the K-12 resources. Yacapaca http://yacapaca.com alone contains 2125 free, collaboratively-user-authored courses (I just counted them) on every curriculum subject and then some.

Pdonaghy February 16, 2008 at 9:36 am

Hi Jeff
This is a great resource site. I can see that I will be coming back! You might be interested in adding your blog information to the new International Edubloggers Directory at http://edubloggerdir.blogspot.com
Patricia

jtcobb February 17, 2008 at 11:55 pm

Wayne–Thanks for dropping by. I’ll check out the WikiEducator offering and encourage others to do so as well.

Ian–Yes, I completely agree. This is a pale shadow, the smallest fraction of what is actually out there–which is most of the point of even undertaking this exercise. The old mantra is that information wants to be free. Learning seems to have the same inclination.

Thanks, Patricia–Heading off to the directory right now!

Jeff

Gus Austin February 19, 2008 at 1:41 am

Jeff,

What an amazing resource! – And yes, the trick is to figure out ways for users to easily discover and recommend all this content. I think aggregation and ‘digg’ style submission systems provide ways for users to recommend their favorites. Sites like the following, but with an education/learning focus, might provide a valuable way to find what’s relevant to the user:
http://www.newsvine.com/
http://www.nowpublic.com/

I’ve been spending a lot of time exploring these issues and concepts in the world of Drupal (http://drupal.org/). As both a web framework and rapidly growing community, there’s a lot of exploration in development, and the business models around open collaboration and learning.

Here’s a little resource page I constructed awhile ago:
http://wiki.pepperalleyproductions.com/Learning_and_resources

Enjoying the blog!

Gus

Michael Werner February 26, 2008 at 4:46 pm

Great site.

Anyone who’s interested in teaching will likely enjoy seeing all the free teacher-related goodies at http://www.Teachbits.com.

Catharina March 14, 2008 at 10:38 pm

Thanks for this great list! I would like to suggest two more resources for the open education initatives:

http://selfproject.eu/
http://www.open-of-course.org

jtcobb March 16, 2008 at 3:04 pm

Gus, Michael, Catharina–Thanks so much for dropping by and adding more great resources! –Jeff

Kare Anderson March 17, 2008 at 10:02 pm

We join the legion of others who recognized what a valuable list you have offered the rest of us so we wrote about it yesterday (and will mention it at the annual iabc conference in N.Y.)
http://www.movingfrommetowe.com/2008/03/16/making-conferences-more-meaningful-by-harnessing-technology/

gabriel cortez March 18, 2008 at 5:48 am

I browsed some of the sites from this list and found that there are valuable resource materials here for learning and teaching.

It is so hard not to be overloaded with information. It takes time to look for the one online education site that will provide the specific area where one is interested

Thank you for providing a good and reliable list.

T March 19, 2008 at 4:47 am

That’s certainly a well-organized list of resources with a great variety. I’d also like to add one to the Language category.
http://www.italki.com (T,I) – Practice any language with global language exchange
Thanks!

nelsy del maestro August 10, 2009 at 11:15 am

What are the rules to use this website ? are there any fees? can any one use it ?
Hope to hera from you.
Thank you;
nelsy

Asim Jan December 2, 2009 at 12:01 pm

Hi everybody;

Please find below an excellent link to online free course on “First-Aid”:

https://www.ambulance.net.au/onlinecourse/enrolled_courses_content.asp#

I found it very useful.

It basically provide basic information on life saving in the time of emergency. I recommend it by saying that this course is a MUST for the purpose of life saving.

By the way successful completion of this course leads to a beautiful printable certificate.

Best of luck and stay safe!

Jon Ellis December 7, 2009 at 5:22 am

You have included a good list of higher / open education initiatives. I would also add http://beanbaglearning.com – a free resource enabling independent tutors to share learning resources (via creative commons licence) and market their services.

Jon Ellis December 15, 2009 at 10:25 am

I should also add a new tutoring collaboration website to the list of open education initiatives http://tutorhub.org

Hansoo Lee January 21, 2010 at 9:24 pm

Hi Jeff! Magoosh is a new GMAT Prepoffering made by UC Berkeley students and GMAT veterans/experts. Our goal is to make high quality GMAT available to all by providing a high quality service at a low cost. On Magoosh you can answer 80 questions for free and get detailed explanations and analytics on your strengths and weaknesses. We hope this will help all who are studying for the GMAT!

Hansoo Lee
Co-founder, Magoosh.com

learn online free January 28, 2010 at 2:12 pm

This is a very informative post. I got some valuable information on this site. Thanks for sharing. :)

James February 20, 2010 at 6:35 am

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