You Can Learn Anything Online – All It Takes Is The Motivation

Today, there’s more resources than ever to learn something new and interesting online. I’m a believer in independent and selective learning, and think that the old assumption that traditional education is necessary to succeed is dead.

Now, you can learn almost anything you want from online resources. Specific sciences are still a bit impractical, but for the majority of relevant topics, all it takes is motivation. And if you’re in the process of building a company, working on a new project, or perhaps just need to get a specific task accomplished, the online resources are invaluable tools to help.

A couple I know about:

- Lynda.com (min $25/mo): Learn computer programming, music production software, photography, and a variety of other tech-related topics. It uses short instructional videos and gives you files to complete projects on your own computer as you follow along.

- YouTube.com (FREE): Learn from others around the world. While the production value typically is much lower as something like Lynda, YouTube is still an excellent resource to learn. The free, short tutorials that people post have helped me with specific bits of knowledge I’ve needed with photoshop.

- KhanAcademy.org (FREE): Straight from Salman Khan and a recent investment from Bill Gates, this website is used by millions of kids worldwide as a replacement for formal schooling. It covers a variety of subjects, from algebra to real estate, from MAT Test Prep to Organic Chemistry. If you’re shaky on a particular part of your class, perhaps KhanAcademy can help.

- MIT OpenCourseWare (FREE): Learn from some of the best professors in the country through MIT’s online video library of their actual courses. They even give you the tests and class assignments too. Because of the length of each video, though, I find it a bit hard to get through.  Now, they’re even offering online testing, interactivity and student-to-student communication.

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

- Mahalo.com (FREE): This website was founded by Jason Calacanis, who is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor I really look up to. I haven’t used this site for much more than learning how to cook a specific dish or how to play a song on the guitar, but I know it has great videos for a variety of How-to’s.

- Stanford E-Corner (FREE): I had the opportunity to meet Tom Byers, who founded this entrepreneurial program at Stanford. The man’s awesome, and really believes in helping entrepreneurs. This website offers some great entrepreneurship videos from prominent Silicon Valley business people for anyone interested. It’s primarily broad knowledge, as opposed to learning a specific skill set, but still great to watch.

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/

-TED.com (FREE): I think we’re all already familiar with these amazing conferences. It’s extremely high quality presentations, practiced to the very second. The speakers range from Bill Gates and Richard Branson, to Alexis Ohanian and Malcolm Gladwell.

- UCSB’s TMP Lecture Series (FREE): If you want to see some of the insightful entrepreneurial lectures I had the opportunity to experience at UCSB, here they are. Like Stanford’s E-corner, they’re packed with knowledge from leading business people in the tech industry. This actually flew under my radar for the longest time, and I just recently discovered it.

http://www.tmp.ucsb.edu/extracurricular/video.html

Web/iOS Programming & Design Specific:

- Codecademy.com (FREE): Right now, they only offer Javascript courses, but have a great interface and coding tool.

- Oreilly School Of Technology ($200-300/course): This is probably my favorite way to learn how to code online.  It’s expensive, but you have constant projects that are graded by a teacher in Arizona.  In order to pass, you have to get every assignment/project checked off.  Nothing builds fluency in a language better than actually using it.
http://www.oreillyschool.com/courses/

- Treehouse ($25-50/mo): This is Ryan Carson’s new startup called Treehouse that uses well-made videos to teach valuable web languages and skills.  It’s still pretty new so they don’t have a lot of courses, but it’s definitely worth looking into.
http://teamtreehouse.com

Some others are..

JoVE.com – Like YouTube, but for scientific research and peer review around the world. Can’t wait to see ‘Crowd Accelerated Innovation’ occur around this online ecosystem. If your a scientist, you should check it out because it will break down the publishing wars between innovative institutions and make it a global project.

Udemy.com – I haven’t tried it much yet, but they have a variety of free & paid courses on a variety of entrepreneurship-related topics.

Udacity.com- Coming from a couple former Stanford professors, Udacity is a (currently) free online educational tool to learn how to code.  Currently, I’m enrolled in a 6-week course about building a search engine using Python.  Every week, they give you assignments with a series of short videos and quizes.  It teaches well, and has so far included a little more theory than I’m used to.  You can tell the teachers are actually professors, as they seem to care more about accuracy in their phrasing.  Other course that they offer, or plan to offer are: CS 373: PROGRAMMING A ROBOTIC CAR, THEORY OF COMPUTATION, and OPERATING SYSTEMS.  Pretty awesome stuff.

These are some of the ones I know of, and I’m sure you all know of other valuable tools.  There’s no excuse for not learning about what you love.  Please share any you may know about, and offer people the opportunity to learn and grow, no matter what their personal situation is.

Tags: codecademy, independent education, jove, khanacademy, learn, learn anything online, lynda, mahalo, mit, online, oreilly, standford, ted, treehouse, ucsb, udemy, youtube