Tech Stuff: Online Education

First off, apologies on taking the break I did. I've been a combination of sick, busy, and despondent over the last while, and it's kept me from being motivated enough to write this blog.

Anyways. First post back is going to be a fun one - online education!

It is my belief that the future of education is the Internet. As of the moment, it is already the world's greatest depository of knowledge, and - although I can gain no hard evidence of this - is probably the most-used method of self-education in the world.

There are a lot of obvious and not-so-obvious ways of making the Internet yield its secrets to you. Here are a few that I use...

YouTube

YouTube. Yes, YouTube. YouTube is awesome because people are posting stuff there all the time. Lots of it is junk, or news, or funny videos. However, there is a lot of educational content on YouTube, and the content posted there is generally very palatable. For instance, take a look at this video on a complicated topic in political science.

Social Media

More generally, social media, blogs, and things of that nature. If you're looking at what the right people are putting out, plenty of it is going to help point you in the direction of figuring out things that you are interested in, or things you should be learning, or new things that are just being discovered. Trust me, things like this are super useful.

Google

Perhaps this should have been first. If you know how to search properly, you can find an answer to almost any question. Not much to say about this one.

Stack Overflow, Yahoo! Answers, etc.

There are also a plethora of sites that focus on answering questions on a user-to-user basis. Stack Overflow is a great example of this - the site is devoted entirely to allowing users to answer questions posed by users, usually in some way about computers. Yahoo! Answers is another well-known service of this sort.

Coursera

Coursera is a bit different from the above examples. Coursera is a free online service through which you can take classes being taught by professors at prestigious universities, like MIT or Stanford. You don't get any actual credit for completing the courses - although some offer certificates and Coursera does keep track of your grades in the course - but the classes are, essentially, like taking the class in person, except you don't have to pay.

Go here to find it and browse through some of what's offered. I think you'll be surprised at some of the classes and, perhaps more importantly, some of the universities that offer classes there. I, personally, am always enrolled in multiple courses, and usually do all of the work for at least a few of them.

Codecademy

Similar to Coursera but more focused, Codecademy offers a bajillion guided programming projects in many languages to help individuals learn how to code and how to integrate that code with the Internet. It's great, easy to use, and offers a lot of insight into one of the most important skills of the modern world.

Again, I actually use this fairly regularly as of the moment. My current goal is to finish the entirety of the 'Code Year' track by the end of January, if not sooner. We'll have to see how that goes.


I know I haven't really discussed what online learning is, but these examples should give you a fairly good idea. In my opinion, most self-teaching will go the best over the Internet with, possibly, the help of a book or two on the subject - more as a reference source than anything else. You cannot, after all, trust everything you find on the Internet.

More important, what services do the rest of you use to learn things on the Internet? I want to know, as, being currently unemployed, I'm going to keep learning things until someone hires me for one of them! Great plan, amirite?

As per usual, comments go below, you can follow over on the right, and I hope you enjoyed the read. Let me know how you like some of the services I suggested, if you ever get around to using them!