100+ Crowdsourced Learning Resources.

Because Education Goes Beyond Classrooms.

University education is usually just the beginning of a learning process that lasts for the rest of our lives. Thanks to the internet and new technology new learning is as accessible as it is fun! We are slowly reaching beyond structured 19th century educational systems into unstructured knowledge base of 21st century, however, the resources out there can sometimes be overwhelming, confusing and even hard to find.

Below, we have compiled a list of websites that you can use today to pick up a new skill, grow your knowledge and learn through networking. Choose a topic that you really care about; know what you want to achieve; and find something or someone to inspire you.

1. Expand Your knowledge. Start With Research:

• Start with Google, the most-used search engine on the web.
• Google Scholar: Access to research materials and, if not found on Google Scholar, they’ll help you find them.
• Wikipedia: Get an overview of a topic, then follow links at the bottom to dig more.
• Scholarpedia: A peer-reviewed academic encyclopedia that is edited and managed by expert curators.
• Yale University’s Digital Commons: Visual artifacts available for free.

2. Bookmark, Organize, Read and Share:

• Delicious, Feedly, Diigo: Bookmark anything you find interesting.
• Evernote: Take notes, organize them, and plan your day in an easy-to-use app.
• Google Drive: Save and organize your documents and multimedia, collaborate on projects and share documents with anyone. Invaluable for collaborative work, and passion projects alike.

3. Grow Your Curiosity:

• TED Talks: Learn things you’ve never known about, from the people who are making it happen.
• TED Ed: A more educational take on the TED Talk.
• Future Learn: All the lectures are by the BBC.
• YouTube EDU : It includes a lot of quirky things too :).
• iTunes U lectures : Easy to download audio and video lectures from dozens of institutions.
• Connectedreams Groupinars: Connectedreams’ Groupinars are live curated web video seminars in which select professionals from varied walks of life are invited to share their experiences related to tech, design, start-ups, and new ideas. Our goal is to provide Connectedreams community a chance to interact with some of the industry’s top thinkers. They are free and open to all. We host these seminars on a regular basis. List of attendees will be shared after each event, so that members can network with like minded people.

SAVE YOUR SEAT FOR THE UPCOMING GROUPINARS

DESIGN EDUCATION OUTSIDE OF DESIGN SCHOOLS | Jan 10, 2016 | 8:30pm IST | Free Interactive Web Seminar

DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY FOR SOCIAL CHANGE | Feb 7, 2016 | 8:30pm IST | Free Interactive Web Seminar

• Kickstarter: Check out the Discover page it’s full of some awesome projects.
• Information Is Beautiful: Info graphics, charts, and diagrams that are both thought-provoking and visually stunning.
• Product Hunt: Looking for cool, just-released apps, sites, and products? Look no further.

4. Free Online Courses:

• edX: Not for profit organisation with courses for some of the world’s top Universities. Some courses are free, some are paid.
• Coursera: All the Courses for some of the world’s top Universities.
• Khan Academy: Learn new skills in an educational setting.
• Curious : Grow your skills with online video lessons.
• Peer to Peer University: Leverages the internet and educational materials openly available online, focused on collaborative learning.
• MIT Open Courseware: Watch the same lectures that MIT students learn from.
• Udemy: Experts in any field can create courses which can be offered to the public, either at no charge or for a tuition fee.
• Open Courseware Consortium: Find lectures from a number of prestigious universities like Yale and Harvard.
• Open Yale Courses: Get a Yale education right from your computer.
• Academic Earth : Collects and rates videos of lectures from colleges like Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton.
• Text Book Revolution: Textbooks on nearly any subject.
• Wikiversity: Wikiversity has a wide variety of multimedia course materials, you can participate in the community by editing course material or by joining discussions in the “Colloqium” section.
• Squareknot: From origami to making a sugar scrub — you can learn anything you wish.
• OpenLearn: OpenLearn gives access to course materials and expert opinion on topical issues.
• University of the People : University of the People is a non profit, tuition-free online university based in California and committed to educational access and inclusion.

5. Paid Resources: For When Free Simply Isn’t Enough:

• LYNDA: Learn Software, Business, Creative And Technology Skills.
• Udacity: Focuses more on vocational courses for professionals.
• Saylor Academy: It gives you all the readings, lectures, final exam, breakdown what the purpose of the course was and whether it was 100% complete on the website or not.
• Thinkful: Learn with 1-on-1 mentorship.

6. Code Centric:

• Learnable: Free course: Build Your First Website with HTML & CSS
• Stuk.io : Learn how to build apps like Airbnb, Tinder, Facebook, Trello, Yelp and Kickstarter using Ruby on Rails.
• SitePoint’s JavaScript Channel: Great JavaScript tutorials, for all skill levels, on everything from AngularJS to ES6 and much more in between.
• Codecademy: Learn to code interactively, for free.
• Udacity: Earn a Nanodegree recognized by industry leaders.
• One Month: Learn to code and build web applications in one month.
• Github: The greatest code repository on the Web: learn though mashing up with other people’s code.
• W3 Schools: Free web tutorials on HTML, CSS, JS & more.
• DataQuest : Learn data science in your browser.
• DataMonkey: Develop your analytical skills in a simple, yet fun way.
• LearnPython.org: Interactive Python tutorial.

7. Free Online Course on Creative Coding:

The nature of code, p5.js, Pure Date, Arduino, Open frameworks, Creative Coding, Hello Processing, D3.js

8. Design Centric:

• Stanford HCI course on Coursera.
• Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society — Offered by Penn state and Dr. Karl T. Ulrich at Coursera.
• Design Thinking Action Lab — Offered by Stanford.
• D’source: Free online resources (courses, case Studies, crafts, videos, examples, etc.) on Design in India. This initiative ‘e-kalpa’ is collaboratively developed by the three institutions — IDC at IIT Bombay, NID at Bangalore and DOD at IIT Guwahati along with partnership with many other design institutions and is sponsored by the Ministry of Human Resources, Government of India as part of the National Mission in Education through Information and Communication Technology.
• M. Ranjan’s Blog: This blog was authored by Late Prof. M P Ranjan, Independent Academic, Ahmedabad. It is a greatest resource on India’s design needs.
• UXPin Free Books: Content on mobile & web prototyping, wireframing, mockups, usability testing, project management, design process & more.
• The Hipper Element by Joel Marsh: Crash course on UX Design.
• Smashing Magazine: UX Design Process a lesson by Marcin Treder
• Hackdesign: Receive a design lesson in your inbox each week.
• Key blogs and publications to know more about the UX design process: PatternTap , UI Patterns, UXMag, UXBooth , Nielsen Norman Group, A List Apart, User Interface Engineering , Boxes and Arrows, Usability Geek
• Introduction to Graphic Design: Basics of design theory.
• Beginners Adobe Photoshop: Adobe Photoshop CS5 tutorials for beginners teaches you how to master Photoshop quickly and completely. Certificate of Completion available.

9. Quick Bites:

• Coursmos — Micro-courses that take a couple minutes of your day.
• Highbrow — Get bite-sized daily courses to your inbox.
• Slideshare — Collection of free PowerPoint-style presentations, sometimes with audio.
• Skillshare — Explore thousands of online classes in design, photography, business, and more.

10. Languages — Become a Polyglot:

• Open Culture — Free audio language lessons. Choose from 48 languages!
• Duolingo: Free platform allows you to translate articles with many other people. Offers a discussion forum to speak with native speakers and fellow learners alike!
• Memrise: Learn new vocabulary with flashcards.
• Word of the day by Transparent: Get a new word (via email, RSS, facebook or twitter) in your chosen foreign language every day!

11. Sites Every Entrepreneur Should Visit

• Launch This Year: Guide to help you launch your online business.
• Startup Talks: A curated collection of startup related videos.
• Rocketship.fm: Learn from successful entrepreneurs each week.
• The Lean LaunchPad: How to Build a Startup.
• The Business Model Canvas: a strategic management and entrepreneurial tool.
• HubSpot Academy : The free certification program offers courses on inbound marketing, including website optimization, landing pages and lead nurturing.
• Moz: Learn search-engine optimization to make sure your website is as visible as possible, check out this treasure trove of resources from SEO leader, Moz.
• LearnVest: In addition to having extremely affordable finance classes, LearnVest also offers some of its classes for free, such as “Building Better Money Habits” and “How to Budget.”

12. Create a Network, Find a Mentor Around Your Skills & Learning.

• Connectedreams — Connectdreams is an online data-driven culturally aware networking platform to bridge the role model gap for young Indian women as they make transitions through various phases in life. Whether that is going from undergraduate student into the workforce or higher education, switching careers, going back to work after pregnancy, or even promotion to CEO. Request An Invitation

Connecetdreams’ aim is to incite a feeling of “She did it, so can I”.

• Stack Overflow, Reddit, OpenStudy , Wikianswers , Quora , Urch- Questions and Answers from the community.
• Twitter — Follow industry leaders in your chosen field of learning and ask them questions, or use it to talk to people who are learning your skill.
• Facebook — You can join a Facebook group for anything: learning languages, entrepreneurship groups, learning to code, and really anything you can think of.
• Linkedin — Not just for job searching! You can join groups and ask questions
• Slack — You can create an active chat room for your projects and networks.
• Comments on blogs and Youtube channels — Commenting is a great way to meet people who are interested in similar things. You can do this on blogs, Youtube, Reddit, forums, and more.
• Meetup — Get off the computer and meet face-to-face with people in your area. Use this to create a local network of likeminded people.

Thanks to people sharing up-to-date knowledge & resources openly, anyone can simply log on and start learning alongside millions of other people with the same intellectual curiosity. Crowdsourced learning is a combination of two ideas: open learning, which is using freely available content accessible to everyone to obtain knowledge, and social learning, which is how people learn from one another.

We now have the opportunity to easily collaborate with new peers, find new mentors, follow a new interest and develop a powerful reputation. We can learn by holding conversations with other people who can bring different but related perspectives. In addition, by simply connecting with the right people at the right time, we can fast track our careers.

As technology brings in massive changes every day, both in how we work and how we live, we will require ongoing education just to keep up. Always be curious and never stop learning.

Love,
Connectedreams.com
Expand Circles. Dream Big. Connect Beyond Hyper-Local.

Join The Conversation

P.S. Feel free to add more tried and tested resources in the comments below. We will try to add it in the list above.

Art by Amanjot Kaur for Connectedreams.com

The Marriage Clock ← P R E V I O U S

N E X T → Upcoming Groupinar