What Are Some Good Websites for Online Learning?

Education used to be an expensive, time-consuming commodity in the past. With higher education cost potentially going up into hundreds of thousands of dollars, many potential students were intimidated by the cost and time demands and would opt out and aim for something a bit less expensive and easier to achieve.

The internet has changed almost all of this. With the e-learning education industry looking to be valued at $325 billion by 2025, students have access to millions of hours’ worth of content, and better yet, and there are quite a few to choose from.

At Archy Learning, we are all about eLearning, you can actually even create your own learning course with no coding here, but there are, however, some incredible websites out there today that offer e-learning classes that you can take for nearly any skill set imaginable.

In this blog, we’ll go over our top 7 LMS (Learning Management Systems). These websites all offer online education courses, for both students and lifelong learners, as well as teachers. Some of them even allow you to build your own! Here are our best e-learning platforms below:

1) Khan Academy
2) edX
3) Archy Learning
4) Coursera
5) Udemy
6) Ted-Ed
7) Codecademy
8) Stanford Online

1. Khan Academy

Khan Academy’s mission statement is inspiring, to say the least, stating that they aim to “provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.”

It offers both teachers and learners and offers a wide variety of lessons, from students in kindergarten through to university. Topics have a wide range as well, from history, SAT prep, math, grammar, science, and music lessons. The founding partners have quite the repertoire as well, from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to Google and Reed Hastings. You can start learning anything, anytime, today, making it one of the best e-learning platforms out there.

2. edX

EdX has impressive original founders as well, a few of them from MIT and Harvard. EdX is a nonprofit that has gone global, with the mission to remove the top barriers of an education: Access, location, and of course- cost. EdX has been quite successful, gathering over 20 million unique learners and with over 2,400 e-learning that have come from some of the top universities in the world.

3. Archy Learning

Archy Learning is one of the newest on the block, but yet its impact has been powerful so far. With the vision to allow anyone to create their own e-learning course with no coding, Archy Launched as the LMS that you can use to create your own online course easily, and then launch them effectively.

It also has partnered with Gamify to implement gamification into its learning pathways, allowing teachers to implement leaderboards, badges, and even mini-games into the courses, to reward students for their efforts, as well as have a little bit of fun! You can start creating your own here today.     

4. Coursera

Coursera is another wildly popular e-learning platform, with over 35 million learners, 150 unique universities that have partnered alongside it, as well as 2,700 courses total. There are also 4 different degrees available, and over 250 unique specialisations, you can focus on. The quality of Coursera’s content is top-notch as well, as some of the lecturers are experts in their field, and teach at some of the world’s best colleges and universities.

The courses are mostly recorded video lectures, but Coursera also offers a community-based aspect, with discussion forums and the option to have other peers and students review and grade your work. There are course certificates available as well, making it another one of the best e-learning platforms on the market today.

5. Udemy

Udemy is best known as a global education marketplace. With an impressive 30 million students currently enrolled, and over 100,000 courses to choose from. Other statistics around their content are impressive as well, Udemy has over 42,000 different instructors to choose from and over 22 million minutes of video instruction.

Similar to Archy’s LMS, users can also create their own e-learning courses, and launch them online. Made by the people, for the people.

6. TED-Ed

TED-Ed is TED’s youth and education business, which has won a vast amount of awards on its own. Its mission is to share and spread unique ideas from anyone, teachers and students alike. Known for TED-Talks, TED-Ed has a vast global network of over 250,000 teachers and has millions of students accessing and learning from its content every single week. TED-Ed also offers a unique innovative component, animated videos, and learning platform that allows for teachers to create interactive lessons. It truly creates a unique learning experience for its users.

7. Codeacademy

Codeacademy is a platform that is quite interactive in and of itself- and it teaches students how to program in different programming languages. The courses aren’t even that time intense- most can be completed in 11 hours or less. Codecademy has helped over 45 million students learn a range of topics, from programming to computer and data science, as well as web development.

Some alumni have gone on to work at Bloomberg, IBM, Facebook, Google, and other companies in that sphere, showing that these skill sets are valuable, as well as accessible.

8. Stanford Online

Stanford Online is an initiative from Stanford University, and the site offers courses as certificates, as well as advanced degrees, executive education, and professional certificates. Stanford online offers all kinds of courses from Stanford’s graduate and undergraduate schools, some of them being Stanford Business School, Stanford Medical School, as well as Stanford Law. You can be educated by Stanford- without the hefty price tag! Pretty impressive.

Summary

Whether you are looking to up skill on a particular subject or skillset or learn a new hobby, e-learning education is there, and lots of them are very affordable, and some cost nothing at all. The above 8 mentioned are some of the most popular ones available today, with more e-learning platforms offering new courses all the time, as well as the option for you to create them. What are some of your favourites? Comment below!