the creative lead: Best places to learn online

With 2012 here, traditionally it is a time to make a new years resolutions. If your resolution is to learn something new, this is the post for you. As we all know, the internet is a tremendous resource to learn on your own. Here are some of the best places to educate yourself from the comfort of your own home.

The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit educational organization, created in 2006 by Bangladeshi American Academy educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT. With the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere.

Their library of around 2600 videos covers K-12 math, science topics such as biology, chemistry, and physics, and even reaches into the humanities with playlists on finance and history. Each video is a digestible chunk, approximately 10 minutes long. And it's free.

Khan Academy online
Khan Academy app
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The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. The collaboration was first began by MIT.

You can search for free online courses from prestigious higher education institutions around the globe. Their search index currently contains 6,613 courses from 65 sources and 12 languages, including MIT, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Michigan.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium online
Open Course Ware app
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Open Yale Courses provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge via the internet. The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences. Each course includes a full set of class lectures produced in high-quality video accompanied by such other course materials as syllabi, suggested readings, and problem sets. The lectures are available as downloadable videos, and an audio-only version is also offered. In addition, searchable transcripts of each lecture are provided.

Open Yale Courses online

The Stack Exchange Network, is a group of websites featuring questions and answers. There are 76 question and answer sites on diverse topics from software programming to cooking to photography and gaming. It bills itself as an expert knowledge exchange. While it isn't really a teaching site, it is one of the best places to get an answer from knowledgeable users. Stack exchange uses a social network method to sort through answers. After someone asks a question, members of the community propose answers. Others vote on those answers. Very quickly, the answers with the most votes rise to the top. You don’t have to read through a lot of discussion to find the best answer.

The Stack Exchange Network
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StudyBlue is your online home to store lecture notes and make free online flashcards. With StudyBlue, all of your flashcards, lecture notes, and class summaries are accessible whenever and wherever you choose to study – so study online and on your phone for effective, productive learning. Free. In addition to making your own flashcards, there is a growing list of flash cards already provided for you on a wide range of topics.

StudyBlue online
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Studyblue mobile apps

In addition to the aforementioned list of online resources you can also find books for free online. Project Gutenberg offers over 36,000 free ebooks to download to your PC, Kindle, Android, iOS or other portable device. Choose between ePub, Kindle, HTML and simple text formats.

Here is a list of addition resources and universities that provide education online via reddit (mhertel). We hope this can satisfy your thirst for knowledge and put you on the path to enlightenment through knowledge.