Besides, popular digital learning platforms started offering generous discounts to encourage people to learn online. Formal learning has changed as well. For the first time in history, over 1.5 billion school students around the world switched to online learning due to the pandemic.
Online education has always been a business with a high potential for success, even in harsh times. For this reason, the opportunity to create an online school seems attractive for entrepreneurs. There are a lot of great online courses in the market that can be taken as successful examples, and we’ve prepared short reviews of five of them in this article.
5 Online Learning Platforms of 2020
Massive open online courses (MMOC) help people from any place in the world master necessary job skills and find new hobbies. Such resources typically offer self-paced education, which means that the student is the one who defines the most convenient learning style for them. Here’s the list of five most popular and efficient educational hubs on the Internet that anyone can try.
1. Coursera
Best for getting an online degree at the world’s best universities.
The history of Coursera begins with Stanford University. Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, who were computer science professors at Stanford, got interested in sharing university-grade knowledge online. On Coursera, anyone can study engineering, computer science, data science, medicine, social sciences, humanities, and others. The platform offers four to ten-week learning paths that include video lectures, exercises, quizzes, and final project assessment at the end of each course. For now, it is the most prestigious educational project in the market because the world’s best universities create content for it. Such companies as L’Oréal, Danone, Axa, and others use Coursera to educate their workers.
2. Udemy
Best for learning anything.
Udemy is one of the biggest and most popular online course repositories. It is basically a place where anyone can learn anything. Udemy students can choose from 100,000 online courses to develop professional skills and get useful information on lifestyle and hobbies as well. Udemy for Business allows companies to access the most popular professional courses and encourage their employees to learn and improve. Such major companies as Adidas, Pinterest, Booking.com, and others use Udemy to train their employees.
3. Skillshare
Best for learning and improving creative skills.
Skillshare is an educational hub for creative people founded by Michael Karnjanaprakorn, who was a product team leader at Facebook’s Hot Potato. Skillshare provides non-accredited courses on design, animation, illustration, photography, filmmaking, drawing, tattooing, fashion, gaming, lifestyle, entrepreneurship, writing, and so forth. The platform gives users a limited amount of free courses for beginners and also offers a monthly plan with full access to all available classes. The Skillshare classes focus on interaction rather than theory, so each student gets hands-on experience while developing their own project in the field of interest.
4. Udacity
Best for developing professional skills in computer science and entrepreneurship.
Udacity is a global platform that stimulates career development by teaching the latest technologies to students. It has Nanodegree programs that help students gain field-specific experience in computer science and business. The unique learning method on Udacity allows students to work on real-time projects developed by industry experts and get the necessary skills for a successful career. Users achieve their career goals with the help of experienced mentors and career management support. Currently, a great number of technology leaders hire Udacity graduates and train their teams according to the Nanodegree program.
5. LinkedIn Learning (ex Lynda.com)
Best for learning business, creative skills, and software engineering.
LinkedIn Learning appeared in 2017 after LinkedIn bought Lynda.com. Lynda.com was founded in 1995 to help students with their textbooks and class materials. Nowadays, it’s an educational hub comprising 5,000 courses on technology, entrepreneurship, and creativity. Users must have a LinkedIn profile to access and use this learning platform. As soon as the course is over, a user can add the newly obtained skills and the certificate of course completion to their LinkedIn profile and share this information with their network.
Conclusion
The transition to remote work and education revealed that online learning could be as efficient as the offline one. It still has some limitations compared to offline education. This fact pushes entrepreneurs and education specialists to find new ways of improving online learning platforms. Experts predict a great future for online education, and leading companies are already testing learning-centered design. Everything is moving towards higher involvement of people in online education and increasing the intuitiveness of such platforms. The focus is also on ensuring higher interactivity and hands-on practice for online students. The number of online graduates is expected to rise dramatically in the years to come.
