Source: The Finnish Photography Museum
Online courses are an incredible opportunity for those willing to seek them out and put the time and effort into engaging with the course material. Traditional education, while still great, doesn’t always suit everyone’s life or needs. Online courses offer an alternative way of learning that can help you change your life and change your circumstance in life. We’ve compiled the top 5 reasons to learn something new and hope you get inspired to change your life today!
1. You Want To Learn A New Skill
Skills can be hard to come by in certain jobs or educational situations. If you want to learn how to weld, for instance, it’s going to be hard to come by welding experience while you’re studying acting or working a full-time job as a banker. While this is a unique and peculiar example, the seeming lack of accessibility for job-specific skills are a reality that many people face. Taking on online course can be a means to a new career path or a bolstering of credentials within your current occupational trajectory. And don’t forget the endless hobbies or personal skills you can learn like becoming a better cook or making your own beer! Even learning basic HTML can be a lucrative decision!
2. You Can Gain Credentials, Professional Development, and Experience
Making an upward move can be tedious. Oftentimes, it’s hard to learn the applicable skills for promotion without certain knowledge and experience. Online courses can allow you to demonstrate that you have learned particular skills and expertise, which can help assuage prospective employer’s concerns or show that you are able to take charge or leadership of a particular situation. For instance, it’s very hard to find hard to find many project managers who don’t have PMP certification or a degree in project management—the skill set that many project managers need to learn can be incredibly specific and the credential they earn shows that they have proven they are capable of taking on project management problems. Additionally, in a more stark example, if you need open heart surgery, you are most likely going to try to find a surgeon that has the credentials to do so. Increasing responsibilities usually come with proven track records and taking an online course or gaining certification can help you move up in your career!
3. You Get To Learn At Your Own Pace
Balancing a busy life with work, family, or extenuating circumstances can be difficult on its own, let alone trying to take time out of your day to go to class. Online courses solve this problem by often having pre-recorded lectures, interactive coursework, and homework and testing online. For some, this is a wonderful option—being able to earn a degree from a top universities halfway around the world is a wonderful testament to the possibilities the technological age holds—and learning online is only getting more impressive. This isn’t to discount schools that offer night courses, distance learning, and low-residencies—online courses can be easier because you can better budget your time by being able to pause lectures, step away from the computer, and returning later. For example, if you’re learning how to code, many online courses will track your progress in the cloud and you can pick up where you ended, even if you resume your learning after flying half-way across the world.
4. You Love Learning
With thousands of online courses, it can be hard to sift through them all. However, with open source courses and MOOCs, you don’t have to limit yourself to a given field of study; you can shape your own learning curriculum or simply take whatever courses may interest you (not to mention you can stop taking a class if it isn’t worth your time). By learning new knowledge and skills, your engagement in the world, your job, and other facets of your life opens up—the more education you receive, the better your critical thinking, logic, and problem solving skills usually are. a new language, how the brain works, and pretty much anything you think of. People who continue to learn throughout their lives are typically sharper the older they get, which can be extremely beneficial. As Leonardo da Vinci said, “Learning never exhausts the mind.”
5. Many Online Courses Are FREE!
Perhaps the most important aspect of online courses is that a lot of them are FREE! The great equalizing factor of open source courses and MOOCs is that anyone in the world can take them for free as long as they have a good internet connection. From CEOs wanting to learn more about filmmaking to a young girl in the Philippines who wants to learn about robotics, even to a young man in a small Malawian village self-learning electrical engineering and building wind turbines for renewable energy, if you want to learn something, you don’t really have many excuses not to learn in the MOOC and open source age. With the advent of free, open, and engaging education, inspire to position yourself to make a huge impact on the world, let your dreams come to fruition by taking charge of your life—learn how to become the change in your immediate future! Sign up for an online course today to learn something new and share your knowledge with the world!