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This blog is all about the best resources for free education and professional development online. It’s written by me, [your name], a lifelong learner who is passionate about helping others to reach their personal and professional goals.
If you love learning but can’t afford to go to college or participate in full-scale programs at work, I know you’re always on the lookout for the best places to find free education and professional development resources. These resources are often scattered, or not well-known, so it’s hard to keep track of them all. This blog will help you keep up with the latest offerings from around the web so that you can stay ahead of your goals without spending a penny!
Best Apps For Free Online Courses
One of the world’s best-known online learning resources, Coursera has several thousand courses from leading educational providers. Those include elite universities such as Stanford and Princeton, as well as big-name businesses such as IBM and Google. Coursera offers several thousand free courses across a plethora of different subject areas.
Whether you’re looking for an introduction to programming or you want to get to grips with machine learning, there’s a course on Coursera for you. Another benefit of using the site is that you can complete collections of related courses (known as “specializations”) to really sharpen your knowledge across a particular topic.
Khan Academy has as its mission “providing excellent free education for inquisitive minds worldwide.” It provides its lectures in the form of video tutorials and has proved hugely popular around the world. So, if you’re looking to take on a new course and expand your mind, this is certainly a very good place to look.
Furthermore, Khan Academy offers courses that can help you prepare for standardized tests across a range of qualifications, including MCAT, SAT, and LSAT.
Partnering with world-famous universities, including Harvard and MIT, edX has around 2,500 courses to choose from. It focuses primarily on the humanities and natural sciences, so if you’re looking to broaden your understanding of topics in these areas, it’s a great place to start. Languages and computer science, in particular, are among the most popular subjects on edX.
While most edX courses are free, there are some professional courses that will come at an additional cost, so make sure you know exactly what you’re signing up for before you commit yourself to anything.
Partly owned by the Open University, FutureLearn offers a wide range of free short courses across a range of different subjects. Its short, ‘micro-credential’ courses are available free of charge, and you can obtain a printable digital certificate upon completion (though this will cost you a little extra, with fees starting from around $40).
There are 14 subject areas in total, offering a variety of shorter and longer courses – depending on how deeply you want to go into the topic. As well as how easily or otherwise you’ll be able to fit it into your everyday schedule.
Whatever you’re into, you shouldn’t have trouble finding a free course that interests you from FutureLearn. It has courses in everything from healthcare, science, and engineering to the creative arts and teaching. FutureLearn also offers online degrees, though these are subject to tuition fees.
Also, run by the Open University, OpenLearn is dedicated to offering only free courses. It has nearly 1,000 of them, at three levels of difficulty and depth. These are introductory, intermediate, and advanced. This allows you to select whichever course works best for you depending on where your understanding of the topic is, and how much time you can devote to it.
Some courses are as short as 1-3 hours, while others can take up to 24 hours in total (not continuously, obviously). Subject matter tends to focus quite heavily on education and learning; particularly early years and childhood education, as well as working with young people. So if you’ve got an eye on a new career as a teacher, OpenLearn could be ideal.
online learning apps
- Kahoot!
Gamified lessons to boost student engagement
Age group: 5-18
Kahoot! is a tool for game-based learning loved by millions of educators. It makes it super easy to create, share and play learning games or trivia quizzes and spark classroom discussions in minutes. It allows you to introduce new topics, teach interactive lessons, review, recap, reward, and collect data for formative assessment in creative and engaging ways.
With Kahoot!, you can gamify your online and hybrid classes, but also host vibrant group quizzes and discussions in the physical classroom. In a live group setting, players answer on their own devices while questions can be displayed on a big shared screen. Sending self-paced Kahoot! challenges is also possible, for example as homework or during distance learning.
Kahoot! logo
What’s cool about Kahoot!…
Kahoot! piques students’ motivation to learn with competitive knowledge games and instant scoreboards.
It supports self-directed learning and collaboration. Teachers can encourage students to create their own kahoots, individually or in groups, or let them play in team mode.
It’s a textbook example of increasing student engagement. The platform works like a digital classroom response system where study and play come together, and there are ample options to add videos, images and diagrams.
Besides games and trivia, Kahoot! also offers a means to collect student opinions.
It works both in the physical classroom and to connect with students at home as part of a hybrid or remote education setting.
It comes with an extensive free library. Besides creating custom ‘kahoots’, educators can also simply search and make their pick from millions of existing games.
It’s diverse and accessible: Kahoot! works for any subject, in any language and on any device.
Kahoot! ranks among the top most popular educational apps in the COOL app library and is used daily by our global community of teachers and students!
- Scratch
Coding for budding programmers and problem-solvers
Age group: 8-16
Programming is an excellent way to teach students problem-solving skills and logic. Given the high demand of such skills – and coding in particular – it makes sense to introduce students to it early. Scratch is a free, nonprofit coding platform that does just that. Budding programmers can create their own games and solve problems through coding while practicing their logical thinking and math skills.
On Scratch, students learn not only how to interact with a computer but also to create with it. They can program various media such as interactive stories, online games, and animations by dragging and dropping coding blocks and share their creations with others in the online community. As they code with Scratch, students train essential 21st century skills: They learn to think creatively, work collaboratively, and reason systematically.
Scratch logo
What’s cool about Scratch…
Scratch offers a fun way to learn programming and develop creativity, logical thinking and problem-solving skills without much teacher guidance.
It’s visually appealing and easy to operate. Scratch is designed specifically for young people ages 8 to 16. For children ages 5 to 7, there’s ScratchJr.
It teaches mathematical and computational concepts in a meaningful and motivating context. For example, when controlling the speed of an animation or keeping track of the score in a game a student creates.
It introduces students to the process of design: They get an idea, create a project, which leads to new ideas, which lead to new projects, and so on.
It helps students develop a deeper level of fluency with the digital technologies they encounter every day and combines key 21st century learning skills. For example: creative thinking, clear communication, systematic analysis, effective collaboration, iterative design and continuous learning.
The Scratch website encompasses a whole ecosystem, including the coding app, tips, galleries, educational videos, and more.
The Scratch programming language builds on Google’s innovative Blockly technology.
- Flipgrid
Social learning to empower student voice
Age group: 5-18
A lack of social interaction is often mentioned as a downside of using educational apps in the classroom. Not with Flipgrid! Flipgrid offers a simple, free, and accessible video discussion experience for educators, learners and families. It enables teachers to start a discussion and engage their classroom in a creative digital environment where personalities and ideas shine.
Teachers post topics and prompts to spark the conversation and students can respond with thoughtful short videos. This empowers student voice beyond writing or typing and enhances their learning through public speaking, using emotion, and displaying understanding. An approachable, intuitive tool, Flipgrid offers connectedness and multiple means of expression and can be applied to almost any topic.
Flipgrid logo
What’s cool about Flipgrid…
Flipgrid is the world’s leading video discussion platform used by educators to let students respond to prompts, complete assignments, or simply reflect on their learnings.
It has a virtually endless array of applications, from asking students to describe the way they solved a math problem or review a movie, to engaging them in conversations about current world events and assigning questions as homework.
It provides a fresh way for students to complete schoolwork and involve peers in their process of accomplishing a particular task. This gives insight into students’ learning process while also giving them the opportunity to teach others.
It allows students who don’t feel comfortable speaking in front of the class to share their ideas with classmates on their own terms and in a self-picked setting. Flipgrid also offers a mic-only option and digital stickers that students can use to cover their image.
Because of Flipgrid’s asynchronous nature, it’s a great tool for every learning situation, from remote learning, to BYOD classrooms, to classrooms with fewer devices than students.
It’s highly accessible. From automatic closed captioning to an immersive screen reader, accessibility features are A+.
Flipgrid offers extensive teacher resources. The Discovery Library is full of ready-to-use discussion prompts with 25,000+ community-generated topics from fellow educators and partners.
The Flipgrid blog and Twitter feed are packed with great tips for using Flipgrid in the classroom.
- Calm
Student well-being and social-emotional learning
Age group: 5+
With many schools and districts implementing hybrid learning strategies, well-being and social-emotional learning are rightly top priorities. Therefore, although not completely free, Calm is definitely worth a mention here as well.
Calm is an award-winning mindfulness app that can be used in the classroom, during distance learning or as part of a hybrid educational model. It promotes social-emotional learning and helps young people develop a lifelong capacity for greater self-awareness, concentration, patience and resilience.
The special Calm Schools Initiative is a collection of free resources, from daily breathing exercises, meditations and relaxation activities to a self-care guide for teachers. So both you and your students can start each day feeling calm, concentrated and peaceful.
Calm logo with mountains
What’s cool about Calm…
Calm is a digital tool to reduce stress and anxiety both at home and in class. It can be easily applied in different learning contexts and underscores the core competencies of social-emotional learning.
It can help teachers establish a calm and focused atmosphere in their classrooms in under ten minutes.
It equips students with tools for resilience, self-care and stress management.
Calm has a dedicated Kids section with meditation sessions designed for specific age groups.
The Calm Schools Initiative offers introductory meditation sessions that are designed to help teachers introduce mindfulness to their students.
Also included in the Calm Schools resources is a free selection of meditations, calming music, soothing nature sounds, sleep stories, breathing exercises and more.
The web-based version of Calm can be easily added to your COOL dashboard, so you can find a moment of calm anytime, anywhere, when you or your group needs it.
Conclusion
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