49 best free websites and apps to learn something new

Once upon a time, if you wanted to learn something, you had to a) pay a bunch of money, and b) go to a school or classroom, a place specifically dedicated to learning. Those days are over.

Now, a profusion of apps, websites and institutions offer us a wider variety of (often superior) educational experiences than ever before- and we can access them from anywhere in the world, often for free. The apps and websites on this list can teach you practically anything- from coding and cooking, to surfing and negotiating.

In this day and age, there is simply no excuse to not know something you’d like to know. You can learn anything, for free, at your own pace, anywhere you can access the internet. We’re out of excuses not to educate ourselves- short of downloading knowledge directly into your head, this is as easy as it gets.

This time, I am going to share inspiring apps, websites and tools that you can use to ease your life and take full advantage of without paying a single penny. The era in which we are living is completely digital and full of knowledge that we must keep on learning in order to move forward. So take a look at the list below and don’t forget to share if you find it valuable J

Take free online courses on a variety of subjects

Khan Academy- High-quality free courses on a variety of subjects

Alison- Free online courses from the world’s top publishers.

CourseBuffet- Free online courses created by universities.

Edx.org – Free/Paid online courses from World top universities (Harvard, MIT, UCBerkeley, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia etc)

Udemy- Huge selection of free and premium courses- mostly on technical skills.

Highbrow- Free 10-day courses, divided into 5-minute daily lessons and delivered by email.

Academic Earth- Free online academic education for everyone.

Learnist- Print and video content, crowd sourced and curated by experts.

Degreed- Unlimited learning. Free forever.

Get healthier, be more productive, and learn faster

Memrise- Learn a variety of subjects via digital flashcards and crowd sourced mnemonics.

Greatist- Articles on becoming healthy and happy.

ZenHabits- Minimalist productivity advice, with a focus on psychology.

Anki- Free flashcard software.

Hello Healthy- Short, actionable health weight loss and fitness articles.

Fitocracy- Free workout, fitness tips and fitness tracking.

Learn coding and other technical skills

Codecademy- Learn Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python and more.

Free Code Camp- Learn to code, meet other coders, build projects that help non-profits.

Code.org- Introductory coding lessons, designed for k-12 students.

Data Camp- Free and freemium courses on R, Python and data visualisation.

CodeCombat- Introductory coding lessons, in the form of a fantasy RPG.

Lrn- Phone app with free interactive coding mini-quizzes.

Learn a new language

Duolingo — Learn over 20 different languages, including Klingon for some reason.

Babbel- Free language learning with integrated speech recognition.

Drops- Study a language on your phone for just 5 minutes a day.

Busuu- Community-base language learning. Interact with native speakers.

CoffeeStrap- Practice a new language by voice chatting with native speakers with whom you share common interests.

Lingvist- Learn a language in 200 hours.

Sharpen your social and career skills

Improve Your Social Skills- Free social skills guide from a guy who overcame Asperger’s.

Succeed Socially- Free social skills guide for awkward people.

Job-Hunt.org- Free articles on job hunting, getting promoted, freelancing, personal branding, and other career skills.

Mind Tools- Free tools and videos for improving career, management and communications skills.

Make something

Makezine- Online magazine for makers with guides, projects and news.

Snapguide- Free user-created guides for makers.

ChefSteps- Mix of free and premium cooking classes.

Instructables- User-created guides for making everything from cookies to buildings.

Allrecipes- The web’s largest collection of recipes.

Become a human encyclopedia

InstaNerd- Read a never-ending series of random factoids.

TED-Ed- Curated, high-quality educational videos.

Brain Pump- Watch a random educational video.

Now I Know- Fun facts delivered in a daily email newsletter.

Curiosity- 5 fun new facts, delivered to your phone every day.

Zidbits- Huge collection of articles on fun and unusual (mostly scientific) topics.

Big Think- In-depth videos by experts.

Curious- Sharpen your brain with daily “workouts”

Do something fun

Yousician- Learn your favorite guitar, bass, piano and ukelele songs.

Parkour & Freerunning World- Free Parkour and Freerunning video tutorials. Be careful!

Chesscademy- Learn chess from the masters, and solve chess puzzles.

Pianu- Learn to play piano online.

Surfedukators- Free surfing videos, tips and tutorials

Flowkey- Free piano training app.

Source:- medium.com

What determines your future is what you do in your spare time, not what you do in office time!

Hello, colleagues! Good Evening! I hope you’re doing good and spending life at your best. So, how are your weekends going? Healthy, productive or just into bed all day long? To be very honest with you, I faced a lot of time management issues few months back because I have been managing my time very pathetically and it was like eat-sleep-office-repeat and then I worked on my time and found the thing that induced me to quit habits that I was doing irrelevantly and without any purpose. And this is what I want to share with you today. Time is a precious resource and unless time cannot be managed, nothing can be managed.

Too many people believe that career is determined by the 8 hours of hard work and effort we put into the office and our future and career progression depends on the boss and the company. But the reality is a bit harsh, you are on your own. Let’s discuss another matter! You finish your work at 6pm and go to bed at 12am midnight, how do you spend these six hours. Let me guess, watching TV/movies, playing sports, gaming, or just into bed? What if I say, the activities you do within these six hours are the most crucial and important beyond your imagination. “Cultivation” is forever dependent upon yourself, if you find yourself not progressing in life, you cannot blame and put the responsibility on your company for not grooming you. Solely, you are the one who is responsible and accountable for your life!

1.       What you do after office is important

Clearly, we need to have work life balance. If you have a family, you have to spend time with them. Even if you are single, you also need a reasonable allocation of time to go to gym, to meet with friends, or be alone to meditate and so on. Of course, watching movies, playing games are good. But there are things you do not need to do. For example, watching new Netflix season, 10 hours per week (average time watching TV season), the time spent on playing the game Candy Crush, or spending time stalking your friends on Facebook, it does not seem to be good or productive.

So what should you do? And how can you be more productive?

Let’s start with “why” factor. Why you need to play candy crush or stalk someone on FB, for sure you don’t know. I know most of us do many activities which are totally irrelevant and play zero role in our life so ask these questions before you move on and decide to spend your time. Mind you! Time is money!

·         Does it add any value to your skills?

·         Does it increase your productivity?

·         Does it help you ease your life or make it more complex?

·         Is doing that activity necessary to spend hours of your life into it?

·         Does it contribute towards your life goals or life’s mission statement?

·         Does it help you achieve your definition of success?

If answer to any of 3 to 4 questions is NO, then seriously, you need to re-think before doing that again. How can you stay productive and make the most out of it by staying productive is what I will write in my next article. Don’t miss it out!

2.       Read, Read & Read!

Reading can give you a good head start, this is often what your peers cannot obtain. Compared to others, you are more likely to know other industries strategies and tactics, and that may be helpful to you. You can transfer your knowledge within the organization or within your social network, create new possibilities for yourself, and learn about what and how’s happening in the world. Moreover, your conversation will become more interesting and will encircle around the things you’re reading. Anthony Robbins said, “If you spend one hour a day to learn about a topic, a year later, in this regard, the knowledge you gain will be more than 99.999% of the world’s people.” Even if you have 30 minutes every night, each week you can easily read a book. You may not be an expert, but I promise, you’ll know more than what your peers know.

I would suggest you to google advantages of reading and know yourself.

3.       Do some projects

You can apply the knowledge learnt to real work scenarios, this is only an ideal state. If your company did not give you this opportunity, create opportunities for yourself. Working with a team, you’ll understand how things work in the practical application of the industry, and how it ultimately affect actual customers. You’ll learn how to perform the task and meet deadlines and get feedback on what you are doing and benefit from it. When you are not strong enough, these experience may not have any value to you. But you are still a novice and these experiences are far more valuable than the pay you are getting if you can really convince others to spend on your product.

You can do some volunteer projects. Start doing some DIY projects, you can even make a product out of it. Like currently, as we all know Independence Day (14^th August) is coming, I am working to place my stall in Blue Area and you will see me standing there offering badges, flags, face-painting and all the other patriotic attractive stuff you see around these days. Do come and say Hello to me there!

So take the first step towards your volunteer project and try something new out of the office. But do not let these private jobs affect your work.

4.       Actively build your connections

In your career path, a strong network of connections will make everything accelerate. If you have not set up your own personal connections, you’ll need to divide a portion of your time to do this.

A strong network of relationships, can enable you:

• contact smart friends, and learn their opinions

• get information and knowledge that are difficult to obtain

• income generating opportunities

• help you see the world from different perspectives

• help you identify your strengths, weaknesses & opportunities

Go get to know your work colleague or boss. If you are an entrepreneur, your network connections will be your early customers, your staffs will be your source of capital so rather than going home you should find some inner circles. There are many small groups which are highly relevant to your career. You should try to integrate into these circles. Every week, you can drink coffee together with new friends, or having breakfast or lunch with new buddies will definitely help you expand your circle. 

You can also look into everyone’s career developments on LinkedIn and establish a network with mentors in those professional industries. Who knows they will be your next employers? Your connections will be your most powerful asset in the workplace. Since you have time to watch “Game of Thrones”, you have time to build a social network.

Let me suggest you a very useful yet very amazing social app, a lot of you may already know about it. An app named CouchSurfing. It can help you make friends from different parts of the world in different countries. If you plan to visit any country, you can ask for some local host there and stay with him or you can be the guest of any foreigner in your country. Would you believe, I have been able to make 132 international friends from 54 different countries with the help of this app.

  

      Your life change starts tonight

6 pm to 12 am, you go home, though physically and mentally tired but you are free to do anything. During this time, you can switch off like switching off your computer at your workplace and do something that aspires you, make you smarter, stronger, and have a wider network of people and stop doing those ridiculous things that play no part in your career progression.

From tonight, take an hour a day to do these things just for yourself! Company pays you monthly for 8 hours of daily work, what do you pay yourself for 6 free hours? You want to get paid higher from your employer, in return, how higher can you go to pay yourself in spare time? Decide yourself!

Let’s Quit Procrastination

Hello, Everyone!

Good Evening Mates & Assalam O Alaikum!

To carry on my Inspiration # 2 blog, I must admit something before coming to the point. When I posted my Motivation # 1, I promised to keep you posted with motivations and inspirations weekly. And now, here I am writing motivation # 2 after a month maybe. Now that is what you called a typical example of, Yes!! You got me right. Procrastination it is! You got me!!

Now in our lives, we do procrastinate in every part of our life (at least I do a lot), and unless we don’t work and try to get rid of this habit, it will only prolong day by day. So in order to get rid of it, we must take some time out for ourselves and we have to find where do we lag and why did this happen? Once you start thinking about yourself and your weaknesses, I am sure you’ll start working on it! But the big dilemma of our society is we can spend hours, nights & days, in fact, months to keep our surroundings happy and lively, we spend years getting rich experience from our employers, we spend countless time with our buddies and the dilemma I am talking about here is, we hardly spend a moment for ourselves. Ask yourself, how many times did you spend time with yourself? Now here spending time with yourself is not listening alone to music or watching some movie, or whatever activity you do, but spending time with yourself is looking thoroughly into yourself, analyzing and evaluating yourself, observing yourself critically and then took some time out to write feedback to yourself. How many times you sit aside alone, forgetting all the hustle and bustle of this world, and listen to yourself? One of the attributes that successful people have is they self-evaluate on weekly basis and then they observe the change in themselves that how much they have improved over the period of time.

We must admit, we take each and every second to judge others within a moment. We all judge people by their faces, we judge them by their dressing,  their way of talk, their way of walk, I mean like Facebook, we have become a Comment Machine now! And yes, ask another question to yourself, how many times did you comment yourself? How many times did you observe yourself with the same criticality and then commented yourself just like we all do to others? Hardly a single time maybe, do you know why? Because we never got a single moment for ourselves. We are so busy commenting other people lives that we keep on ignoring until we have zero energy to invest in ourselves.

So, in order to move forward in our lives, we must need to live with the Inside Out Approach. That says “The Strengths Strategy approach to creating great results is an inside-out approach, which begins first, with the Individual, and their own understanding and growth, and then moves outward to impact the Interpersonal relationships, Teams, and ultimately, the Organization, environment, and the nation”.

Reasons of Procrastination:-

Most of the people procrastinate because of the following reasons. Keep reading and see which of the following reason traps you.

·         I started something with huge motivation and excitement but that didn’t last long.

·         I was inspired to do something, but always waiting for the perfect timing to start.

·         I know what I need to do but I never really do them most of the time.

·         It seems like I have endless mundane tasks that have zero relationships to my true goals.

·         When I finally have free time, I was consumed by distractions and waste it away.

Btw, I am trapped by 3^rd, 4^th, & 5^th reason. The biggest challenge we’re facing in achieving our goals and dreams are either we never start or we never finish. Simply put, procrastination is the biggest reason why we failed. We all set goals early of the years (or anytime during the year), brainstormed the ideas, drafted the action plan, and do everything to get ready to start that big project we always wanted to do. But then, we never start. Even if we started, we got distracted easily along the way and start drifting toward the wrong direction.

In order to beat this cruel enemy of ours, Procrastination, try these simple following techniques and see yourself which of this works for you so that next time you don’t fall in to the trap.

·         Seek Assistance – Engage your family member, your best friend, or any of your confidant to support you in reaching your milestone by constantly reminding/bugging about the task you need to get done

·         Exercise Regularly - Exercise is proven to increase productivity, especially as you age. You will have more energy. You will feel happier. And you will be healthier. Exercise also boosts creativity. People must be more conscious of their physical health, and better stewards of the bodies God created for us.

·         Delegate, Automate or Eliminate - Look at all the things you have to do this week. Ask, “Can this be delegated, automated, or eliminated?” If you can delegate it, send it to someone else’s way. If you can automate it with technology or a template, do that. If you are honest, a lot of things simply do not need to be done. If it’s a recurring task and doesn’t lead to the mission statement, eliminate it. Just say “No” Stop doing it, and do the things that produce the most fruit.

·         Reward/Punish Yourself – This is my personal favorite. Set small milestones for yourself and breakdown your tasks in chunks and set deadlines for every chunk. Now for each milestone, set reward & punishment. For example, I am writing this blog for today and if I complete it by tonight I will dine-out from the best steak house in town or whatever you love most. If not, I will donate 500Rs to some charity or help the community in some way. You can set rewards and punishments as intense as you like according to the criticality of the task. This reward/punish yourself is so effective and amazing that it will force you to do a certain task but keep in mind, you have to be very honest and loyal with you while following it.

·         Tasks Timer - Think about how much you need to get done when you only have a short time to finish it. Setting a timer forces you to focus and work fast. Many people swear by this Pomodor Technique. Give it a try. Set a timer for 25 minutes and see how many emails you can answer before the buzzer. Think of it as a game, and you will get a lot more done with a lot less wasted time.

The biggest investment that you’ll ever make in your life will be the one that you’ll invest in yourself. It is never too late. This is the right time & the right moment.

I will end the Motivation & Inspiration part # 2 with my own quote.

“You are born to leave an impact on this world, find it, live it, work on it and share it unless your impact brings a change in the World” – Abdul Rauf Liaqat.