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Distance learning without a degree

Many people need an education, and the actual course certificate is then essenatial for their future career. I myself once attended a very short creative writing course online from Oxford , which very expensive, and then i actually got a certficate from oxford, even though the course was very short. A sort of Ivy League curiosity in my closet of ecceentricity. However, there are excellent resources for those who do not need a certficate.

1. Chatgt
2. Distro Tv offers a free wondrium stream
3. Historyradio.org, my own station
4. Audiobookradio.net, my british competitor
5. Gresham.ac.uk
6. University of california tv
7. Open university online
8. NIH video lectures archive, for you medical people
9. The British history association has a very good podcast directory
10 Talking history archive at http://talkinghistory.org/
11. C-span lectures and archives
12. WBBH boston has a lot of free stuff online

I could go on forever with lectures and streams. But if you then move into various forms of interactive learning, chatgtp is by far the best. But the old moocs offer quite a selection. Edex, coursera etc.

There are also various forms of interactive atlases in which historical periods or events are animated in maps or diagrams. These are on youtube and everywhere online. There is a great interactive map of the roman empire

https://orbis.stanford.edu/

Som years back, some people belived that games would somehow revolutionize learning. So far the only piece of gamification that has succeeded you will find in simple vocabulary learning apps like "fun easy learn". The large scale very popular educational game which teaches you valuable things has not really materialized. But it may some day. Many of these old interactive models have yet to integrate AI.

Another element is social interaction with other students, real people, like you find here oir in dedicated facebook or linkedin groupos.

A very neglected aspect of teachers' training is the use of data display software, such as gapminder or Tableau.

Reply 1

michaelhw

I would like to emphasise the two most relevant things for teachers these days, 1. methods of data aggregation and 2. methods of data display.
Online there is in fact an almost inexhaustable supply of free stuff, so aggregation just means methods of finding and retreiving what you need as quick as possible, for instance by means of rss, search engines, AI etc and display just means how you then present this to your students.

The presentation is crucial. In fact, how intutitive webpages or a presentation are is often what decides their usefulness. I know this stuff because i am 50, and i began making hobby educational websites in the early 2000s, almost everything has been about history and literature. My early attempts were of course pretty basic. But these days a lot of ready made or modular solutions exist. There is no need even for coding. An educational tool these days may not even have to involve the production of original content.