Appendix E: Free Online Learning
Khan Academy
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is amazing. If you haven’t seen it yet, please take a look. The founder started out by teaching his cousins remotely and putting the videos on YouTube. He then created hundreds of videos, teaching millions of people. Khan Academy encompasses nearly every subject: science, math, finance, history, computer science, and more. The amazing thing is, it’s all free!
Contrast this, for example, with the price of higher education in the United States. It’s been skyrocketing,
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owing partly to government-funded student loans and partly to other factors.
Online education is flourishing. Many classes in this space are free or very inexpensive. Coursera
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allows students to take courses from leading institutions, such as Stanford, Princeton, and Emory University. Online interactive platforms such as Codecademy
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(free) offer to teach you to program.
The Death of College?
Is there any point in going to college anymore? College offers so many benefits other than the obvious textbook knowledge: learning to work with others, the social life, athletics, and accountability (not to mention the prestige associated with a degree). However, it seems like these benefits could be achieved in different, less expensive ways—perhaps not a degree but something like certificates, which could be just as useful.
You’ve probably been able to simply buy books and teach yourself or learn by doing, so let’s not overestimate the potential of online learning. However, with so many alternatives cropping up and the advantages of college being questionable, it’s easy to imagine education being less expensive in the future.
Sustainability
Sure that’s all great, but are these “schools” sustainable? What is the business model? Well, Khan Academy is a not-for-profit
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venture, so its future is entirely dependent on the generosity of donors. The other institutions cited are conventional companies. Some offer free samplers, with normal courses requiring tuition. Coursera and its peers will most likely charge only for the certificate, not the actual learning. This is a promising business model.
More Online Resources
The following is a list of various web sites offering the opportunity to learn just about anything:
Khan Academy
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: Math, Python
Codecademy
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: JavaScript, HTML/CSS, PHP, Python, Ruby
Coursera
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: Algorithms, Programming, etc.
Pluralsight
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: Ruby, Python, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, iOS
Udacity
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: Everything from “Introduction to Computer Science” to “Applied Cryptography”
CodeCombat
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: Learn JavaScript through a game
EdX
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: Free online courses by Harvard, MIT, and more