I really like the latest developments in the online education/learning field. Some of the startups are really creative and changing the traditional boring means to learn with more fun, gamified, self-learning online resources. On these sites, you will not only be able to learn, but also contribute to the community if you are good in certain subject fields. This is a great way to harness the benefits of crowdsourcing.
Below, you will find some of these websites:
Code Academy
Codecademy is an interactive and fun way to learn coding. By asking you to type set of words and answers to questions, it will involve you in a two-way communication. By the time you realize, you will be coding and understanding the concepts of object oriented programming. It also employs social elements to the site, so that you can learn together with your friends.
Website: http://www.codecademy.com
Khan Academy
Khan Academy has a huge collection of 2700+ free videos. And it’s a work of one man, Salman Khan. What started of as a casual online tutoring sessions for his relative’s kids, turned out to be one of the largest non-profit educational organizations in the world.
He has MBA from Harvard, he has three degrees from MIT: a BS in math and a BS and a master’s in electrical engineering and computer science. His website is mainly popular for his maths videos, which are easy to understand and appealing to school kids. You can read more on Khan’s story at the following sites; Money.CNN, Wired, and SiliconPrairieNews.
Website: http://www.khanacademy.org
TreeHouse
Treehouse is a fairly new website that concentrates on providing instructional videos on Web Design, Web Development and iOS Development. As a part of its teaching method, it uses ‘badges’ similar to what FourSquare does, you will get a badge for answering questions correctly. However, unlike CodeAcademy and KhanAcademy, Treehouse charges for its service, starting $25/month.
The project is backed by one of the well known investors, namely; Reid Hoffman, Kevin Rose, David Sze, Chamath Palihapitiya and Mark Suster.
Website: http://teamtreehouse.com
Veri
Veri is a veri good website :) It’s a community managed website that have a wide range of topics, from online marketing to understanding term sheets to parenthood. Yeah that’s how wide their array of topics are. Teaching method employed at Veri is multiple choice based questions, if you answer the question wrongly, you can learn the right answer.
You can also invite your twitter and FB friends and see their progress and classes that they are taking. You can also create your own lessons or contribute new modules to the existing topics.
Website: http://www.veri.com
Code School
Last but not least, Code School is a paid service ($25/month) that teaches variety of programming and web design subjects. Their teaching method combine video, coding in the browser, and gamification principles to make learning more fun and therefore more effective. There is a selection of free courses that you can take.
Website: http://www.codeschool.com
What you say?
I hope you liked the resources. Do you know of any other resources that are making a difference in online education/learning? If you do, please plug them in the comments section.
UPDATED: JAN 19, 2012
- Skillshare.com – marketplace for teaching and learning. Find people to teach or learn from. All classes happen in real life/offline.
- Udemy.com – create your own video lessons, take courses from others.
UPDATED: APR 10, 2012
- Programr.com – learn tons of programming languages.
UPDATED: APR 15, 2012
- CourseHero.com – website that collects education related videos from youtube and arranges/categorizes in different subjects, making them a course for you to take and follow thru.
Hey Abdylas, thanks for the post and covering Code School. Often I feel like we’re the underdog of the bunch since we have no famous advisors, investors, or foundations funding our work. Thanks for including us!
Gregg, you are welcome. I understand what you mean. Few constructive feedback that I can give regarding your site is, i think you guys should highlight your FREE classes. Also make it easy to signup, using Twitter or Facebook (more detailed info you can collect later). Overall, the design of the website is professionally designed, but it gives impression that you guys are actual physical school, rather than online learning center (maybe it’s the building pic on the front page). Anyway, good luck with the project!
Code Academy seems like a good site to learn coding. I wonder what languages they teach. I hope it’s PHP since it’s one of the in demand codes in this generation.
Its so nice.Thanks for shraing.
Learning online is fast becoming a trend in today`s world. It is interesting to see how so many sites are up and running teaching people various things online. In the future I think learning online will be the ultimate thing.
Great information Ades! Keep your good work.
Code Academy seems like a good site to learn coding.would be useful to try
these days most of them are doing e learning. good one thanks.
awesome article. I sincerely believe that online education is the future.
I really liked your webistes suggestions. Already bookmarked!! thank you!
Nice post and no doubt online education is excellent opportunity for those who are not be able to get knowledge like whom are paralyze and something else, that’s why its best for every aspects,.
Thanks for sharing
the value of a good education is not measurable in any amount of montary system. An educated being is capable of living a better life.
Amazing collection of interesting links to learn about web design and programming. Thank you for sharing.