Lifelong Learning

If I were asked to define who I am, I would probably say I am a teacher and a student. These are two of my main roles in life. My qualifications and most of my professional experience are in teaching English and my passion is learning - anything and everything. Besides my university degree in Philology and Teaching English, I hold various diplomas and certificates in Psychology, Hypnotherapy, Computer Science, Digital Marketing, Writing for the Web, French, Portuguese; I have done numerous non-certificate online courses (Food Science, Screenwriting, Creativity, etc.) and I know I want to keep learning and motivate others to learn, so today I am going to share with you some of the resources that I have used or just know of for learning online.

So let's start:

1. Explore https://www.mooc.org/, https://www.mooc-list.com/, https://www.edx.org/ - Massive Open Online Course aggregators - to find courses on various subjects from leading universities of the world. All the courses are free, but if you are interested in getting a certificate at the end of the course you will have to pay a small fee (50-100 dollars/euro depending on the course). The courses consist of video lectures, additional reading materials, assignments and group discussions.

2. https://www.udemy.com/ - Udemy=you+academy is an interesting platform where you can find both free and paid courses on a variety of subject from people like you and me who are experts in certain areas. You can not only find something to learn on this platform, but also create a course yourself.

3. https://www.masterclass.com/  Here you can learn writing with Neil Gaiman, acting with Helen Mirren, cooking with Gordon Ramsay, and many more exciting skills from famous experts for a fee of 16.67 euro a month (billed annually)

4.  https://www.linkedin.com/learning/ (formely lynda.com) offers paid video courses from industry experts in software, creative and business skills. They offer a free trial month and occasionally they offer a free access to courses for a week to linkedin.com members.

5. If you are into learning languages like I am, here are some of the resources I've used for learning different languages.
Firstly you can find courses in different languages on MOOC and EDX websites (see number 1 on the list).
For learning English: https://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish
For learning European Portuguese (from Portugal): https://www.practiceportuguese.com/
For learning French (not for beginners): tv5monde.com/langue-francaise
And one more interesting resource I have heard about but haven't used myself is a free app HelloTalk for learning any language by chatting with native speakers around the world: https://www.hellotalk.com/
* For speakers of the Russian language I would also like to mention a Russian linguist and polyglot Dmitry Petrov who has done a series of programmes on TV for learning various languages in 16 hours.  You can find his courses on YouTube channel Телеканал Культура