September 2009

Digital learning or e-learning has come up as a huge incentive for millions who have left hope for reading and learning due to lack of time or money. The biggest benefit of Digital learning is that one does not need to be presented in class rooms live, despite; he can learn things all the time. Digital learning is merely not a medium to learning for student pursuing higher studies but also in corporate sectors where companies are using this as a tool to train their employees. Following are some of the best free resourced for Digital Learners.

Columbia University Interactive
Columbia Interactive provides a list of selected courses on e-learning at Columbia University. The huge database at Columbia University includes digital resources like   faculty interviews, learning tools, semester-length e-courses, and more than 100 shorter e-seminars. The open course ware at Columbia University is maintained by Columbia University Digital Knowledge Ventures (Columbia DKV).

Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative
Digital learning courses provided at Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative are to meet out the great challenges of education in the 21st century that is to make intelligent use of modern information technology. For learning community, it’s mean providing free materials, activities and assessments to them and OLI (Open Learning Initiative).

Duke Law center for the Public Domain
To propagate and expand the ideas as covered by the public domain in form of ideas, images, sound, discoveries, facts and texts which are free to use and prepare without any objection from intellectual property rights, The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School has for the first time have adopted this idea.  And to achieve the objective, it has started the program in September of 2002 as part of the school’s wider intellectual property program.

Harward Extension School
Digital learning options in more than 100 streams provided at Harvard Extension School are for students who are too busy in life to take course in subjects of their choice and opinion.  The courses provided at Harward Extension School can be taken from any corner of the world and are open for enrollment.

Gresham College
Gresham College as prepared by Sir Thomas Gresham in 1597 is an independent educational institution operated from Barnard’s Inn, Holborn, in the centre of London. The college provides free public lectures by its eight professors and don’t award degree or teach courses.

MIT
MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication virtually providing course ware for all the MIT course content. These are open ware courses and are provided as permanent MIT activity.

Open University
Here at Open University, access to the students is provided for Open University course material which is a learning space, where students can have free study units each with a discussion forum.

Tufts University
Tufts Open Course Ware is part of new educational approach as initially adopted by MIT which provides free course content to everyone online. The courses at Tufts are most useful and radical for students especially in life sciences apart from other multi disciplinary courses.

University of California
OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a free and open digital publication from the University of California that provides University level educational programs including syllabi, lectures notes, assignments and exams.

University of Washington
University of Washington online courses provide free digital learning in broad range of popular subjects formatted for high quality instruction online. At courses in University one can enroll at any time.

Teachers are one of the known communities which are frequently visit Twitter as for the sake of learning and disseminating knowledge and among the most popular profiles on Twitter.

Karen Clark
A former kinder gatern teacher as well as part time teacher in 2nd , 3rd and 5th grades is now more into marketing of direct sales product called ‘Story Time Felts’ that is a imaginative teaching tool for kids. That product she offers to parents, home schooling, families, teachers, children librarians, churches, therapists and other who work with children.

We are Teachers
It is an online community of teachers from all sectors and areas. It is web place for various teaching aspects like Teacher social network, Web 2.0 education, knowledge Marketplace and school 2.0. Professionals at We are Teachers have extensive history of working in environment of teaching and teacher’s training. It inspires members of community to freely interact through a community profile, subject interest circles, media sharing, forums, blogs, etc.

Chad Outten
He is a moodle expert, educator, technologist and Golfer who provides consultancy, hosting, training and support for educators. He inspires connected, communicative, collaborative and experiential communication between participants through Web 2.0 tools like blogs, forums, messaging, podcasts, RSS feeds and wikis.

Enlightenment Media
Based at Denver, Colorado, Enlightenment education blog provides all the requisite information on education and online learning. Run by educational professionals it has tips on school financial planning to test preparation. Here the latest news and information that you require is provided. Address to the blog is http://www.online-degree-enlightenment.com/blog/

Teacher Created
This Twitter profile leads to the address http://www.teachercreated.com/blog/ where teacher created resources, free lessons and more for Pre- K to 8th Grade teachers. Interestingly, all the prepared stuff is here for teachers prepared by teachers.

Math Vids
Operational from Michigan, it is Math Video website run by a math teacher. It is a great resource for home schoolers, students and teachers. The site provided by SchoolVids run on notion to change thinking of Americans about education and learning

Bob Uppington
From Bristol, United Kingdom Bob is devoting his life to the cause of education in Nepal, Sri Lanka and India.  He founded an educational charity in 1996. At tsunami he was in Sri Lanka in December 2004. There his group re-constructed 29 destroyed nursery schools on the East Coast. And is involved in other charity related to education and learning.

Victoria Westcott
Residing at Victoria, BC, Canada she is owner of blog Classroom Canada and is author of the Guide to Teaching in London. She provides consultancy to the teachers who wish to move to London, England from USA and Canada for purpose of learning and teaching. And this all she is doing after her being a Canadian primary school teacher and experience of teaching in London for 3 years.

Math Daddy
From Japan MathDaddy has 10 years of experience as ESL teacher, and is currently owner of an educational website that is quite helpful to school teachers and homeschool moms and dads.

BCHK_teacher
Teacher of English at British Council in Hong Kong, learning resources for teachers and students are provided over here.

Prior to the advent of e-learning, university education could only be obtained by those who had the time to physically attend the classes thus some people were forced to either quit their jobs or forego the higher education all together. Online higher education is growing at a fast rate due to the convenience it accords the students as they can learn from the comfort of their homes. Online university reviews are meant to give all prospective students a general picture of how the institutions operate and exactly what to expect from the system.

The online universities usually offer distance learning programs that include the course work, assignments and exams. The channels used to connect the students and the tutors include email, internet conferencing and interactive learning discs. The student can therefore be able to make references later.

Unlike the conventional higher learning institutions where students are crammed up in a classroom, online universities offer a chance to students to do their studies in privacy and at their own pace. Students can therefore concentrate on the more hard topics until they feel comfortable in them. This is one of the reasons why online universities are continuously gaining popularity as they recognize that every student is different and thus the need for each to be allowed to study at their own rate.

Online university education is generally cheaper as some of the requirements needed in a conventional education system are not asked for. For instance there are no transport costs or accommodation fees that are charged in institutions that offer boarding facilities. Not to mention the amounts paid for registration every semester and other education materials such as books.

However, online universities have some limitations in that they eliminate the student-tutor relationship that is fostered in the conventional education system. A tutor’s presence is very important to a student as it’s said to instill some level of confidence and security to a student. Similarly online education systems may not give the tutor a chance to monitor the academically poor students or give remedial sessions to them. The student-student interactions are also eliminated.