Online learning platforms

Online learning platforms: This segment may not be too appealing if you have children, as you’ve probably been e-learned to death.
- Skillshare: But if you’re finding yourself in the need to learn something that will be of absolutely no use and you are learning it out of boredom, then Skillshare is perfect for you. Now it is for subscription, so you may want to ask yourself is it worth spending money to learn origami.
- Fender: That’s right, that Fender – the guys who make those guitars. They’re now offering three months of free guitar, bass, and ukelele lessons. Some of us here regret not having made the effort when we were young and had all the free time. But now, here we are.
But if you are serious about learning a marketable skill, then look no further than the Your Wealth issue last September on continuing education. There, we name-dropped some of the abundant online resources on offer. Leaders in the online learning field include Khan Academy, Lynda, Udemy, Udacity, edX and Coursera. You can check out these lists of the 24 best websites for learning new skills and 43 great free courses offered by Udemy, edX and others. There’s also the Open University, a longtime pioneer of the distance learning course, is now joined by others, including Cambridge’s Institute of Continuing Education (ICE), MIT, Harvard and Stanford.
And if you want to catch up on some reading, then you are in luck. While there are a number of sites out there that offer free audio and ebooks, a number of places online have opened up during this crisis. Apple has made some of its ebooks and audiobooks inventory free online for US users to get them to stay at home. If you are a resident of New York, The New York Public Library has an app that allows anyone with a library card to "borrow" any of the 300,000 e-books in the collection. You can even look through the free ebooks section on Kindle, Barnes & Noble and Kobo. We want to give a shout out to the admins of the Internet Archive. In addition to the free documentaries, you have access to 1.4 mn free books. Also a shout out to Project Gutenberg and it’s library of over 61k free ebooks. We recommend Kobo Books and Google Play Books, which are both free, and Audible and Audiobooks, which are not. But since we don’t know how long we’re stuck here, it could be worth investing USD 15/month.