5 Easy to Use Learning Websites that are Free on the Web

Our world is powered by knowledge. Opportunities tend to flourish as you gain more knowledge and understanding that you gain about the world. Essentially, in the US and the Age of the Internet, the amount you can learn is only limited by yourself.

That said, there are plenty of well developed websites out there where you can broaden your knowledge.


Here are 5 sites that truly put the emphasis on the user experience and make learning easy and fun:

CodeCademy

CodeCademy makes learning how to program easy. The exercises are simple and easily digestible. Likewise, they build upon each other, teaching you something new while making you utilize what you have already learned. The "Code Year" feature, aiming to teach you how to program within one year,  is a great place to start because it hits all of the major topics for you to start programming on the web.

What makes it addictive is the points and badging system. Your score increases as you gain more programming wisdom all the while you continue earning new badges with every exercise that you complete. Within weeks, I was coding my own websites and applying the knowledge I had learned to my work. It has also made me think more about how I can automate my work so that I get much more done each day.

Coursera

Coursera is like open course ware (OCW) on steroids. Coursera partners with a number of colleges and universities worldwide to provide their classes online, for free. Take a class in Archaeology from Brown or Sustainability from the University of Florida, or even Exoplanets from the University of Geneva.

You can sign up for classes and take them right along with others who sign up for the class. Many even offer a signed Statement of Accomplishment upon course completion, while these statements do not currently count towards college credit, they do provide proof to you that you know the material. You could apply your new-found knowledge to your hobbies and work. You could even utilize it to test out of a similar class at your local uni or at an online non-profit, accredited university like Western Governors University.

Duolingo

Duolingo is for learning languages online. They have the most robust online language learning platform that I have ever seen. Their exercise make you listen, type, and even speak the new language. The exercises are simple and intuitive, with pictures and audio. You can hover over words to see what they are in English. If you already know some of the language, you can test out of the exercises, and if you need a refresher, you can do the timed practices.

The forums are a valuable asset, where you can see where others have had difficulty in the past and learn from them; for example, like many others, I had a hard time discerning the French audio between Le and Les, but a reply in the forum helped me train my ear to hear the difference between the "luh" sound and the "lay" sound.

Lastly, Duolingo found an ingenious way to earn revenue without ads. You do real world translations as you learn. Crowdsourcing helps select the best translation for each sentence, and Duolingo makes money from the transcription/translation services.

Khan Academy

This is the giant in the room. It is one of the more popular learning sites on the web, and there is certainly a reason why. Khan academy video lectures are entertaining and informative. They are broken down into short videos, making it easy to digest the material, and there is a lot of material.

Likewise, if you have knowledge you would like to share, you can create your own videos or be a coach and use videos from the site to help you teach in a real world setting.

Memrise

Memrise is like crowdsourced knowledge. People from all over the world can make courses that tech others. Courses are broken down into smaller steps that teach you tiny bits of knowledge. These are broken down further into flash cards called mems. You get to pick the best mem that works for you or you can even make your own mems and publish them for others to use.


You can learn almost anything that their is to learn. Biology, Data Analytics, Languages, Philosophy, even practicing for the SAT or GRE. The success in memrise is that it is very much community driven - the lessons, the mems, to the learner leader boards, and even competing for the highest points standing among your friends. It makes learning an addictive game.