Can online learning tools help you (or your employees) develop business skills?
Entrepreneurs and small business leaders need to develop new skills, just like every business professional. But you rarely have time for extra-business activities like taking business classes, let alone full degree programs! And money to invest in education doesn’t come easily from the tight budget of a startup.
Maybe you haven’t finished college, and need courses to beef up your skill set or brush up on business concepts. Or, you have a degree already — but running a small enterprise requires a huge variety of skills and knowledge. You can’t easily drop your projects (and clients!) to attend college for a semester or a year.
Thankfully, we live in the age of online education! The same technology infrastructure that’s opened opportunities for your entrepreneurial ideas has also enabled an explosion of educational tools and resources — available any time, at your own pace, and in many cases for free!
Many of these classes and programs rival what you’d learn at Ivy League universities … some of them even literally mirror the curriculum offered by the best colleges.
I know you’re busy; running a business is already more than a full-time job. But you can do this — a little at a time if necessary, and at no cost.
Let’s start with a shortlist of online schools and resources you can explore and dive into today:
Traditional College Curricula — yours for the taking
Academic Earth: An ever-growing collection of online college courses, made available free of charge, from some of the most respected universities including Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Dartmouth, NYU, Princeton, Stanford, University of California and Oxford. Courses in Accounting, Business, Education, Entrepreneurship, Management, Marketing, Mechanical Engineering, Literature, Political Science, Psychology, Systems Engineering and much more.
COURSERA: An education platform that partners with top universities and organizations worldwide, to offer hundreds of courses created in dozens of subjects including Computer Science, Economics, Engineering, Humanities, Management, Math, Physics and Law. Courses are free and open to anyone, and learning is free.
Duke U: Free courses from Duke University in many subjects from Architecture to Law, Engineering, History, Politics and Science. Provided via the iTunesU platform.
edX.org: With diverse subjects including Biology, Business, Chemistry, Computer Science, Finance, Electronics, Engineering, History, Math, Philosophy, Physics, Statistics and more, edX offers “real” classes from some of the best professors and universities, designed specifically for interactive online study. Berkeley, Boston University, Georgetown, Harvard, Kyoto University, University of Washington, and many more.
MIT Open CourseWare: Virtually all MIT course content, OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity. MIT hopes that “independent learners enrich their lives and use the content to tackle some of our world’s most difficult challenges, including sustainable development, climate change, and cancer eradication.”
Open YALE Courses: Free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn. All lectures are recorded in the Yale College classroom and are available in video, audio, and text transcript formats.
Small Business Development Center (Kutztown University of Pennsylvania): One of the largest collection of free, on-demand, individualized and self-paced entrepreneurial training resources available in the United States — over 90 programs and constantly adding more. Includes Online Learning programs from the SBA, IRS, Small Biz U, Virtual Advisor and custom programs.
TUFTS Open CourseWare: Tufts offers many of its course materials online, employing the University’s strengths in the life sciences in addition to its multidisciplinary approach and international perspective. The site includes coursework from Tufts’ schools of Arts and Sciences, Engineering, Medicine, Dentistry, Nutrition Science and Policy and more.
Specialized Learning Tools — learn exactly the skill you want, in a way that fits your style
ALISON: Lots of free, high-quality resources to help you develop essential, certified workplace skills. Over 600 courses in a variety of subjects including Financial & Economic Literacy, Digital Literacy & IT Skills, Health and Safety
BBC Languages: Audio, games, vocabulary, grammar explanations and exercises. Lessons differ, with some offering only basic phrases, while others offer multi-level courses to reach fluency. 40 languages including Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Irish, Spanish.
Codeacademy: Learn to program, interactively, for free. Even if you have no computer coding experience, learn something as basic as how to make a website, or something more complex like how to make a Rails Application or code Javascript, jQuery, Python, Ruby and PHP.
DuoLingo: Learning a language with Duolingo is fun and addictive, and their bite-sized lessons are effective. Earn points for correct answers, race against the clock, and level up. (Bonus: while you learn a new language, you’ll also be helping to translate the web.) You can learn Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Irish, Danish and Swedish.
Khan Academy: Entrepreneurship or Arts of the Islamic World, Microeconomics or Multivariable Calculus, Chemistry or Computer Programming — among thousands of mini-lectures you’ll find on Khan Academy, which promises always to be free and to offer practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard that empower learners to study at their own pace in and outside of the classroom.
Microsoft Virtual Academy: Helps developers, IT professionals and advanced students learn the latest technology, build their skills, and advance their careers. Offers online Microsoft training delivered by experts to help technologists continually learn, with hundreds of Microsoft training courses, in 14 different languages.
My own business: This one really hits the small-business owner’s need on the head — My Own Business is a nonprofit organization committed to helping people start and succeed in business. The free courses are presented by successful business owners who point out the common, avoidable mistakes. Its business plan session provides sample business plans you can download to get you started. The how to start a business and business expansion courses are easy to understand, and designed for entrepreneurs.
OEDb: Literally a searchable, menu-driven database of over 10,000 free online classes from many sources (including some of the sources listed here). A good place to start if you know the precise topic you want, but don’t know what programs offer it.
Open Culture: Not a school in itself, this may be the single richest list of free learning tools (and links to them). It’s an enormous source of free education and media! It links to free textbooks, free movies, high-quality educational YouTube channels, great lectures from thinkers like Margaret Atwood, Sun Ra and Jorge Luis Borges, and free art and images from The Met, The Getty, the British Library and more. It offers 150 free online Business courses, and classes in everything else too, from Biology and Engineering to Math and Religion.
OpenLearn: Free access to Open University course materials, including Psychology, History, the Arts, Languages, Money & Management, Nature & Environment, Science, Math & Technology, People, Politics & Law and more.
Scitable: A free science library and personal learning tool from Nature Publishing Group, concentrating on genetics and cell biology, which include the topics of evolution, gene expression, and the rich complexity of cellular processes shared by living organisms. Scitable also offers resources for the budding scientist, with advice about effective science communication and career paths.
Udacity: Perhaps the option most focused on job skills, Udacity offers “nano-degrees” in tech skills for Web Developers, Data Analysts and Programmers — the classes are designed by and recognized by tech industry leaders like AT&T, AutoDesk, Google and SalesForce to advance your career via project-based online classes.
Udemy: Offers paid as well as free courses in almost anything you can think of. Udemy uses a crowd-sourcing model (or, professor-sourcing) so its offerings are limited only by the imaginations of those who have something to teach and sign up to be part of the system. Contributors include hundreds of experts including CEOs, celebrities, best-selling authors, and professionals from many fields.
So many ways to learn the skills you need
Is this too many online educational resources to ponder in one day? OK — next time you’re feeling you need to upgrade your skills, or your employees are asking for resources and advice on how to improve business knowledge — you have no excuses. Turn to these links, and crack those books!
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Who is John Paulsen? A former small-business leader myself, I feel your pain (and joy) and hope you’ll enjoy the blog. I launched and ran a well-regarded production company in San Francisco with a team of 9 brilliant, hard working people. I learned to manage a wide array of tasks a small business must handle — business strategy, facilities design, HR, payroll, taxes, marketing, all the way down to choosing telecom equipment and spec’ing a server system to help my team collaborate in real-time on dense media projects from multiple production rooms. I’ve partnered with and learned from dozens of small business owners.
