Many organisations globally have advised their employees to work from home to reduce the risk of coronavirus infections.
An extended period of stay-at-home work translates to significant savings in commuting time and expense. This could also result in better well-being.
It has been found that longer commute times are associated with lower job and leisure time satisfaction, increased strain and poorer mental health, according to a study on How commuting affects subjective wellbeing published in the journal Transportation .
The absence of commute time, by working from home, increases job satisfaction and leisure time activities, the study said.
Credited with more productive resources, professionals can invest their time and energy to learn new crafts, hone skills, get certified and advance at work.
Employees learning new skills or upgrading themselves will also help organisations in the long-run. Some of the online platforms are tying up with companies to develop their employees to build new capabilities for the future.
A growing number of online learning platforms are making this task easy for motivated professionals. Some of them are listed here:
edX
edX is a massive open online course (MOOC) platform built by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University. It offers university-level courses, and has tied up with over hundred institutional partners globally.
The platform offers some of its courses free, and the rest are charged. Some of its programmes allows certified students to use their successful completion records to enter full-fledged Masters programme at edX’s affiliate universities.
edX hosts courses across a range of disciplines and subjects.
Coursera
Similar to edX, Coursera offers a range of courses that can pursued online. Most courses are 4-6 weeks long and end with a capstone project. The platform also offers hundreds of free courses through which professionals can access video lectures and join virtual community discussions. To earn a certification, one has to pay the full course fee.
Coursera has also partnered with corporations like Google and IBM to offer professional certificates to prop up job-ready learners.
Udemy
Udemy functions as a marketplace for learning and teaching. It connects instructors and teachers with students around the world. It also offers curated collection of business and technical courses to companies to help their employees learn new skills.
The platform connects over fifty-seven thousand instructors with over five thousand businesses to upskill their employees.
Unacademy
Tailored for students preparing for civil services, bank jobs and other competitive exams in India, Unacademy acts as virtual coaching centre. It offers over 2,400 lessons and specialised courses to over three lakh students.
Its online platform helps India’s government job aspirants to chart a learning journey to ace the competitive exams.
Codecademy
As the name suggests, the platform is built for individuals interested in learning to code. The online site offers a range of programming courses. Its basic version gives 180 hours of free lectures. And the paid version charges about $15/month with up to 1800 hours of lectures.
Skillshare
This is an online learning community focused on creative classes tailored for individuals with interest in design, photography and video-making. Skillshare functions as a marketplace which allows teachers to load content on their platform. A user can choose Skillshare’s free or paid option to learn a skill in their area of interest.
The paid version gives access to over twenty thousand classes, while the basic version provides only 1,600 classes. The premium version charges $5/month to access all the classes listed on the site.
