{"id":1277,"date":"2016-09-06T07:37:03","date_gmt":"2016-09-06T06:37:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/?p=1277"},"modified":"2016-09-09T11:48:20","modified_gmt":"2016-09-09T10:48:20","slug":"online-courses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/2016\/09\/online-courses\/","title":{"rendered":"Online courses"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s back to school time, so I&#8217;m considering taking up a course. Online courses are often easier to fit around work and life, not requiring in-person attendance at a specific location at a specific time, so I&#8217;ll be reviewing some of the following sources to find a suitable option. <!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/alison.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">alison.com<\/a> &#8211; A catalog of free online courses across a wide range of topics (languages, computer skills, history, sciences, &#8230; <a href=\"https:\/\/alison.com\/learn\/\" target=\"_blank\">full subject list here<\/a>). Registration is free, and all courses are free to take &#8211; really! You can pay for certificates, transcripts and the like to add to your CV\/portfolio, but if you&#8217;re purely after knowledge acquisition, it&#8217;s genuinely free.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lynda.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">lynda.com<\/a> &#8211; Subscription-based, but your first month is free. There&#8217;s a &#8220;reactivate&#8221; option, which seems to suggest that you could let your subscription lapse then reactivate it later if your schedule changes and you can&#8217;t keep up a study commitment, but I haven&#8217;t tested that and it&#8217;s not stated explicitly in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lynda.com\/support\/faq.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">FAQs<\/a>. Check out <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lynda.com\/subject\/all\" target=\"_blank\">their catalog here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.open.edu\/openlearn\" target=\"_blank\">OpenLearn<\/a> &#8211; The Open University provide a range of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.open.edu\/openlearn\/free-courses\">free courses<\/a>. You can also sign up for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.openuniversity.edu\/courses\" target=\"_blank\">paid ones<\/a>. OU have been around a long time and produce good content. Who remembers getting up early on a weekend morning to follow along courses on the TV before the advent of the internet? \ud83d\ude42<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.udacity.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Udacity<\/a> &#8211; Free and paid individual courses plus paid &#8220;nanodegrees&#8221; (with the possibility of earning rebates for finishing a program in a given timeframe). This site has a strong focus on IT\/programming skills. Nanodegrees are by monthly subscription ($199\/month) and you can take as little or as long as you like to study, though you won&#8217;t get the rebate if you take too long. It looks like you can <a href=\"https:\/\/udacity.zendesk.com\/hc\/en-us\/articles\/208262413-How-can-I-pause-my-Nanodegree-program-\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;pause&#8221; your study<\/a> once for up to 30 days if you need to take a break. Their <a href=\"https:\/\/www.udacity.com\/courses\/all\" target=\"_blank\">catalog is here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If you know of other good online learning resources, please give them a mention in the comments!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s back to school time, so I&#8217;m considering taking up a course. Online courses are often easier to fit around work and life, not requiring in-person attendance at a specific location at a specific time, so I&#8217;ll be reviewing some of the following sources to find a suitable option.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[61,34],"class_list":["post-1277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-learning","tag-website"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1277"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1351,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1277\/revisions\/1351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}