Online course materials offer a more personalized experience for learning, which beats the classroom experience. Last two decades have seen a huge growth in online resources for education. One can find excellent video channels and podcasts for learning all kinds of subjects.

What are the top free online learning resources? Specifically, let us look at resources for Online Video Lectures.

MIT Open Courseware (OCW): http://ocw.mit.edu/

Comprehensive repository of materials from many classes at MIT.

However, there is little course-to-course standardization.

Most courses lack user interaction/customization and focused visualizations.

Khan Academy: https://www.khanacademy.org/

Khan Academy was started by an MIT alum, and a ex-Hedge Fund guy, to help teach his cousins via YouTube. Now it serves thousands of courses in mathematics, science, finance, and history and more to students across the world.

Students rave about the quality of courses. Additional assignments and exams are also provided.

Khan Academy recently started a no-barriers, worldwide school effort at https://schoolhouse.world/, which offers free online tutoring.

There is a growing community of students who now benefit from that.

Coursera: https://coursera.org/

Coursera is a very popular platform for learning with certification, boasting of over 50 million learners and thousands of courses and certifications.

While Coursera isn’t free, you can audit all courses for free and learn the material.

Courses also get updated often and you can access improved versions of same courses.

Some of the most popular courses on Coursera are:

• Learning How to Learn (McMaster University)
• Machine Learning (Stanford University)
• The Science of Well-Being (Yale University)
• Successful Negotiations (University of Michigan)

Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/

Udemy is a very popular platform for learning.

The videos are user generated and often you can find videos on a broad range of topics taught by amazing teachers.

Udemy has also grown in popularity across the past decades.

YouTube: https://youtube.com

Yes, that is not an error. There is more to YouTube than simply watching music, movie and shorts videos.

Youtube is an awesome platform to learn almost anything.

There are thousands of amazing educations videos and amazing teachers, who care about your learning.

Simply search for your subjects or topics on Youtube and you will find so many relevant results and latest educational content on every topic.

Once you find interesting stuff, make sure you Subscribe and come back for updates.

One issue is that there is a lot of content, so use Vizle to retain some sanity :)

Alison: https://alison.com

This is a growing community of millions of learners and experts from the industry.

There are courses on many disciplines: from business to mathematics and health.

Alison also offers diploma programs for in-depth study of topics so that you can achieve mastery.

Berkeley Webcasts: https://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php,

This is also available as podcasts from iTunes: http://itunes.berkeley.edu/

Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE): https://see.stanford.edu/default.aspx

Another collection of lectures from Stanford Univestiry.

Note that although the above resources are terrific, they are generic and cover a vast set of disciplines and topics. Students from specific disciplines / community tend a prefer more specialized avenues for learning.

For example, Medical students need to learn a vast amount of topics as part of their curriculum and rely a lot of online videos. We will cover the top online learning resources for medical students and other specializations in other blogs.

Meanwhile, make sure you bookmark the above resources and try them out when looking to achieve your learning goals.

Vizle - learn faster and smarter from Videos

The surplus of free resources, in turn, has led to a new problem. Suppose you want to study a subject X. What are the best online resources to study X? Sifting through Youtube channels or Coursera / Udemy videos, to find the course that best matches your interests, consumes a lot of time. Students and professionals therefore waste countless hours going through videos and later realize that the video isn’t good enough for their learning.

Vizle solves this problem for the users who want to find the perfect resource for learning. Vizle converts YouTube and personal videos into online slides, PDF and PPT. Now, instead of going through a bulky video, and listening at the slow pace of the speaker, you can quickly scan through the content (slides or PDF), read parts of the spoken notes and see if the video is indeed useful for you. The notes are in a reader-friendly format, so you can read / skim much faster. This saves you a lot of time, and helps your choose and revise your learning resources far more effectively.