In today’s ever-connected world, having access to the internet is quickly evolving from a luxury to a necessity. Everything from paying your bills to applying for a job to researching a school paper is primarily done online. But with internet prices averaging about $60 a month, it can be difficult to find low cost options that fit your budget.
The Allconnect® guide to low cost internet options and affordable internet plans can help you identify government assistance, income-based and provider-specific programs that offer low- cost internet for families, students and seniors. More details are available here.
Online learning may not appeal to everyone; however, the sheer number of online learning sites suggests that there is at least a strong interest in convenient, portable learning options — many of which are study-at-your-own-pace.
Art and Music
- Dave Conservatoire— Dave Conservatoire is an entirely free online music school offering a self-proclaimed “world-class music education for everyone,” and providing video lessons and practice tests.
- Drawspace— If you want to learn to draw or improve your technique, Drawspace has free and paid self-study as well as interactive, instructor-led lessons.
- Justin Guitar— The Justin Guitar site boasts over 800 free guitar lessons which cover transcribing, scales, arpeggios, ear training, chords, recording tech and guitar gear, and also offers a variety of premium paid mobile apps and content (books/ ebooks, DVDs, downloads).
Math, Data Science and Engineering
- Codecademy— Codecademy offers data science and software programming (mostly Web-related) courses for various ages groups, with an in-browser coding console for some offerings.
- Stanford Engineering Everywhere— SEE/ Stanford Engineering Everywhere houses engineering (software and otherwise) classes that are free to students and educators, with materials that include course syllabi, lecture videos, homework, exams and more.
- Big Data University— Big Data University covers Big Data analysis and data science via free and paid courses developed by teachers and professionals.
- Better Explained— BetterExplained offers a big-picture-first approach to learning mathematics — often with visual explanations — whether for high school algebra or college-level calculus, statistics and other related topics.
Design, Web Design/ Development
- HOW Design University— How Design University (How U) offers free and paid online lessons on graphic and interactive design, and has opportunities for those who would like to teach.
- Skillcrush— Skillcrush offers professional web design and development courses aimed at one who is interested in the field, regardless of their background — with short, easy-to-consume modules and a 3-month Career Blueprints to help students focus on their career priorities.
General – Children and Adults
- Scratch – Imagine, Program, Share— Scratch from MIT is a causal creative learning site for children, which has projects that range from the solar system to paper planes to music synths and more.
- Udemy— Udemy hosts mostly paid video tutorials in a wide range of general topics including personal development, design, marketing, lifestyle, photography, software, health, music, language, and more.
- E-learning for kids— E-learning for Kids offers elementary school courses for children ages 5-12 that cover curriculum topics including math, science, computer, environment, health, language, life skills and others.
- Ed2go— Ed2go aims their “affordable” online learning courses at adults, and partners with over 2,100 colleges and universities to offer this virtual but instructor-led training in multiple categories — with options for instructors who would like to participate.
- SchoolTube— SchoolTube is a video sharing platform for K-12 students and their educators, with registered users representing over 50,000 schools and a site offering of over half a million videos.
- Grovo— If you need to learn how to efficiently use a variety of Web applications for work, Grovo has paid (subscription, with free intros) video tutorials on best practices for hundreds of Web sites.
General College and University
- edX— The edX site offers free subject matter from top universities, colleges and schools from around the world, including MIT and Harvard, and many courses are “verified,” offering a certificate of completion for a nominal minimum fee.
- Cousera— Coursera is a learning site offering courses (free for audit) from over 100 partners — top universities from over 20 countries, as well as non-university partners — with verified certificates as a paid option, plus specializations, which group related courses together in a recommended sequence.
- MIT Open Courseware— MIT OpenCourseWare is the project that started the OCW / Open Education Consortium [http://www.oeconsortium.org], launching in 2002 with the full content of 50 real MIT courses available online, and later including most of the MIT course curriculum — all for free — with hundreds of higher ed institutions joining in with their own OCW course materials later.
- Open Yale Courses— Open Yale Courses (OYC) are free, open access, non-credit introductory courses recorded in Yale College’s classroom and available online in several digital formats.
- Open Learning Initiative— Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU’s) Open Learning Initiative (OLI) is course content (many open and free) intended for both students who want to learn and teachers/ institutions requiring teaching materials.
- Khan Academy— Khan Academy is one of the early online learning sites, offering free learning resources for all ages on many subjects, and free tools for teachers and parents to monitor progress and coach students.
IT and Software Development
- Udacity— Udacity offers courses with paid certification and nanodegrees — with emphasis on skills desired by tech companies in Silicon Valley — mostly based on a monthly subscription, with access to course materials (print, videos) available for free.
- Apple Developer Site— Apple Developer Center may be very specific in topics for lessons, but it’s a free source of documentation and tutorials for software developers who want to develop apps for iOS Mobile, Mac OS X desktop, and Safari Web apps.
- Google Code— As with Apple Developer Center, Google Code is topic-narrow but a good source of documentation and tutorials for Android app development.
- Code.org— Code.org is the home of the “Hour of Code” campaign, which is aimed at teachers and educators as well as students of all ages (4-104) who want to teach or learn, respectively, computer programming and do not know where to start.
- Mozilla Developer Network— MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) offers learning resources — including links to offsite guides — and tutorials for Web development in HTML, CSS and JavaScript — whether you’re a beginner or an expert, and even if you’re not using Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser.
- Learnable— Learnable by Sitepoint offers paid subscription access to an ebook library of content for computers and tablets, and nearly 5,000 videos lessons (and associated code samples) covering software-related topics – with quizzes and certification available.
