The global coronavirus pandemic has created a rift in business, work, and life as we know it. The event has not only disrupted work-life but has also put an end to our social lives.
Where many are working from home, millions around the world have been laid off due to dwindling revenues. However, this is not a reason to give up on you career, business, or entrepreneurial dream. You can consider it as an opportunity to pick up new skills, which is quite easy thanks to plenty of MOOCs (Massive open online course) offering great value.
As Alibaba group’s Jack Ma puts it:
For people in business, 2020 is really just a year for staying alive. Don’t even talk about your dreams or plans. Just make sure you stay alive. If you can stay alive, then you would have made a profit already.
Here we are with part 2 (Part 1) of the online platforms you can benefit from via free online courses to brush up your skills during this downtime.
Skillshare
Covering a vast array of topics, Skillshare can help you learn everything from technical subjects to arts subjects, including business and entrepreneurship, writing, painting, personal branding, etc.
Unlike other platforms, where you have to pay a certain amount per course, Skillshare works on a subscription model that translates into a yearly or monthly fee. However, as the world scrambles to stay afloat during the pandemic, to help the housebound masses, the company has announced a 2-month-free-trial. Signing up will give you access to more than 2000 courses for free.
Great Learning
Great learning is an ed-tech company that offers programs that provides a learning platform for critical career competencies such as Analytics, Data Science, Big Data, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Computing, DevOps, Full Stack Development, and much more.
The platform works in collaboration with renowned universities like Stanford, Purdue, Pes University, and others.
As an initiative to help students and professionals around the world, the platform is offering more than 70 free certified courses for the time being.
Educative
Educative is a platform specifically developed for individuals who are interested in leveling up their coding skills quickly and efficiently. The company has only recently announced their free of charge learning software development initiative for students and professionals amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. The company writes:
If you’re one of the millions of people around the world whose life or livelihood has been interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, we want to help.
All you have to do is sign up and apply for a scholarship. This will give you access to courses that cover fundamentals of front-end web development, from HTML and CSS to JavaScript, through an interactive approach. Each course normally costs around $117.
General Assembly
With expertise in experiential education, the General Assembly helps individuals learn web development, data, design, business, and more with GA. The company has an award-winning curriculum and a professional community of 40,000-plus full- and part-time alumni.
During the pandemic, the platform is offering more than 20 free live interactive workshops on topics including marketing, programming, and data science. Each workshop normally costs between $60 to $200 each.
To help individuals improve their programming and cloud computing skills, Google has announced a 1-month free trial to its Google Cloud Training. This includes courses from Coursera Specializations or Pluralsight Paths. Every course approximately costs around $49 normally.
All you have to do is sign up for the program. Even individuals with little or no knowledge of cloud computing can benefit from the program.
Conclusion
Quarantine or not, in order to cope up in this digital age, it is imperative never to stop learning. Learning has never been easier, thanks to the wide range of available digital learning platforms.
Irrespective of the field you belong to and the type of courses you are interested in, there is a litany of resources available for you. All you have to do it get up and grab it.
