Learning resources

Now that I have some spare time on my hands, I have been exploring online resources to satiate my thirst for learning. I know that sounds dramatic, but I just love to dabble in and learn new stuff. Especially stuff that I was always interested in but couldn't pursue as a part of my formal education. Over the past few weeks I have come across a number of free online learning resources which are incredible. The content is excellent and has good breadth, its freely available, and the best part - you can set your own pace for learning. You can also use these resources to gain brief exposure to a wide variety of fields, while you decide which fields you want to focus on. I have explored some of these, and am yet to get started on others. A few resources which interested me:

- Duolingo: Duolingo is a language learning website offering Spanish, English, French, German, Portugese and Italian. PD and I got started with Spanish a while back. Duolingo has "gamified" the learning process with points, loss of "lives" on making mistakes etc. Their mobile app (I have tried the one for iPhone) is awesome - it doesnt feel like work or learning and is pretty much fun! And its so much more exciting if you pair up with someone else who also wants to learn the language.

- Coursera and edX: Both of these are "Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)" platforms (I had to google that up :P) Each of them has tied up with a wide range of well known universities as partners. Courses are typically held through video lectures and quizes. Courses offered cover a wide range of fields such as humanities, computer science, statistics, sociology, etc. Excellent platforms to make such disciplines more accessible!

- Codeacademy: Codeacademy offers free classes in coding. I havent tried this yet, but PD has and he enjoyed it. The site currently offers  JavaScript, HTML/CSS, PHP, Python and Ruby. The site has a number of success stories of people with no coding experience who have learnt to code on codeacademy and went on to build successful mobile phone apps, programs for specifics projects/tasks, etc. Quite interesting really, and I hope to try sometime.

- Podcasts: Podcasts are quite an interesting way to learn while on the go - whether you are in the car or out walking/jogging or even while cooking. The iTunes store has a lot of interesting podcasts and a lot of these are free. A number of leading universities such as MIT, Princeton, etc. offer podcasts too. RadioLab is another good place to look for interesting podcasts. Podcasts are everywhere. These are just some that I have come across so far, but with a little bit of googling, you can find podcasts from a variety of sources on a wide range of topics.

And of course, there is the quintessential youtube.com where a number of channels focus on tutorials on a wide range of subjects - from photography to arts to science projects.

On the whole, I am quite excited about my discovery of these resources and hopefully will put them to good use.