Top online resources for continuous learning

You may be in a career break for now and toying on idea on going back to work. You have started looking at various options available to you and at some points you feel it would be good to have a refresher done or if there was any primer on some new concepts that you find interesting to know more. Women often don’t invest in their continuous education or are skeptical about the time and money constraints that come with enrollment for a new course. Sometime we wish we could enroll in a course where we could work on our own pace. Internet is booming with free online courses but are they validated?

Here is a list of online courses started by renowned international universities and organizations that work as aggregator for such courses. Popularly they are known as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), they are free most of the time, short-term, online courses. Indian women working or not working can definitely benefit from these, only requirement is to have a good internet connection.

Coursera: Is a for-profit educational technology company that offers massive open online courses (MOOCs). Coursera works with universities to make some of their courses available online, and offers courses in various subjects (Wikipedia).

Link – Coursera free courses

MIT OpenCourseWare: Free courses on several topics are available. Women in Sciences can benefit from the vast array of science lectures.

Link-MIT open courses

iversity: Is the European platform for online learning that enables universities, research institutions and knowledge-based companies to share a broad range of courses with participants from around the globe.

Link-iversity courses

Stanford online: This is a free online course platform created by Standford University. This platform hosts a variety of professional education opportunities in conjunction with many of Stanford University's schools and departments.

Link-Standford online courses

Pharmalessons:  Pharma related free courses available at pharmalessons. These courses are on good clinical practice, good pharmacovigilance practice, good manufacturing practices. Pharma regulations are always evolving and these can provide a good refresher too you.

Link- Pharmalesson courses

National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL): This is a joint venture by Indian Institute of Technology and Indian Institute of Sciences to bring online certification courses in the field of advanced Sciences and technologies.