Room: BUSINESS LORIS

Skillshare offers more than 18,000 video courses covering pretty much any skill. It isn’t important if you work a 9 to 5 job and simply need to learn some new skills that your boss recommended during the yearly performance review, or, if you want to start a side hustle of building websites but need specialist guidance to help improve your understanding of how to advertise your services online.

Most classes are one hour or less, which makes learning a skill easy and convenient. All courses are self-guided, so you can complete the classes on your own time.

In addition to self-guided classes, you can also participate in projects that reinforce the class materials. If you prefer to learn in a group or want some additional accountability to ensure you finish a course, Skillshare offers workshops to interact with your teacher and fellow classmates.

Some of the workshops include learning how to boost your Instagram followers by 1,000 followers. You can even take a productivity workshop that will help you maximize your time at your day job or side hustle.

Learn Everything About Website Management

Perhaps you’re a bit rusty with your personal computer skills and you have to find out more about website management to market your website. If that’s the case, you should think about these hot Skillshare Courses :

• Search Engine Optimization
• Social Media Optimization
• Search Engine Marketing
• Google Analytics

By choosing a 1 hour class on Google Analytics, you are able to learn from a specialist and even finish the course project to fortify your abilities. In this way, the next time you get Analytics in work it’s possible to say to yourself with assurance, “I understand the way to do so!”

How Much Does Skillshare Cost?

Quite a few Skillshare courses are offered free of charge, however, you’ll have to pay a monthly subscription to receive unlimited use of all 18,000+ courses, jobs, and workshops. As a faithful Well Kept Wallet prepared, you receive two FREE weeks of membership to get complete access to all 18,000+ courses.

You will enjoy all the benefits of Skillshare Premium. Being a premium member lets you watch the classes offline, without ads (which the free classes have), and enroll in as many courses as you can possibly watch.

After the two-month free premium membership finishes, there are two different plans to continue receiving Skillshare Premium access:

Annual–$99 billed once a year ($8.25 per month)
Monthly–$15 billed monthly ($180 annually)

Founded in 2012 by scientists from Harvard University and MIT with a “mission to provide quality education to everyone around the world,” edX offers hundreds of rigorous courses spanning dozens of subjects, all of which feature real classes, from real universities, taught by real professors. In addition to these top-tier universities, edX has partnered with 90 other global institutions, such as Berkeley, Arizona State University, and more.

As a MOOC (massive open online courses) provider, edX features more than 650 courses, 1,700+ faculty and staff, 580,000+ certificates awarded, along with 7 million+ learners around the world. Here, you’ll gain access to a virtual classroom that’s available on your schedule, the latest in peer-to-peer social learning tools, along with cool learning tools, videos, and game-like labs.

To become an edX student, the process works over four steps:

1. Browse through the course list (or search for a specific topic, subject, start time, or class type).
2. Learn what to expect by reading through the descriptions and prerequisites.
3. Click “Register Now” to become an edX student. After registration, the course should be reflected on your personal dashboard.
4. Start studying and connecting with others online.

Even if you’re familiar with more traditional online learning environments, such as distance education courses and online universities, the concept (and benefits) of a massive open online course provider like edX might seem confusing. In this review, we’ll help you clear up any confusion, answer some of your most important questions, and help you decide if an edX course is worth the time and effort.

To begin, let’s look at edX’s different courses.

EdX’s Courses

Overall, edX offers their students five different types of courses:

EdX Verified Courses

Verified courses are ideal for those looking to receive a certificate of completion to satisfy the requirements of an employer, school, or other institution. As the name implies, verified courses require you to verify your identity. How? According to edX, “You will be asked to submit your photo and a photo of an official ID through the use of a webcam. As your course progresses, you may be asked to re-verify your identity.”

XSeries Programs

XSeries programs implement a series of courses that are also verified, and students who successfully complete them will receive a certificate. These courses feature easy enrollment, expert instruction, and high-level classwork from “world-renowned experts and top universities” like MIT, Harvard, and more.

High School Courses

Still in high school but looking to get “college ready”? If so, edX’s high school courses feature introductory classes and test prep in subjects ranging from English to biology. In addition, teachers will be able to integrate much of this content into their classroom.

Credit Eligible Courses

As the name implies, these courses partner with a variety of institutions to help you earn college credits at your own pace.

Professional Education Courses

With an emphasis on hands-on learning scenarios, these courses are geared toward working professionals looking to learn a new skill set or add to their resume. All students will receive a personalized Professional Certificate of Achievement, and some courses may also be eligible for continuing education units.

Who Can Enroll In an EdX Course? How Do You Enroll?

Each edX course will have its own unique set of prerequisites, requirements, and expectations.

To locate your next edX course, simply visit the Courses section of their website and click on the subject you’re interested in. Alternately, you can use the search bar to manually search for a specific term.

Once you find an appropriate course, click on it and you’ll be taken to the home page. There, you’ll find out which institution it’s offered through, the start date, amount of effort required (time range), level, an overview of what you’ll learn, instructors, and more.

Ready to sign up? Just click the green “Enroll Now” button in the upper right-hand corner and follow the prompts.

As you can see in the image above, this course is free. Is this the case with all edX courses, though?

How Much Do EdX Courses Cost?

Most non-Verified edX courses are completely free of charge, although you might be asked to donate whatever you see fit on a couple occasions (read: advertising). On the other hand, Verified courses start at $50 and come with a two-week refund policy. In order to request a refund, you’ll need to send an email to billing@edx.org.

If you need to take a Verified course and can prove that paying for it would cause an undue financial burden, you may qualify for financial assistance equal to a 90% discount.

Want to test out the edX system without committing to a course? Be sure to check out a demo course.

EdX offers a large catalog of courses that tends to favor higher education and the sciences. At last check, there were 420 courses available from sixty-five universities, non-profits, corporations, and other organizations. That catalog shrinks quickly, however, when you narrow your search. One hundred and sixty of those courses were already completed (Archived), 89 were opening in weeks (Coming Soon), and 94 would not begin for at least a month (Upcoming). This left about a hundred courses from which to choose, a respectable, but by no means Coursera-sized buffet (over 900). The sciences have an outsized presence: I could choose from nineteen classes in computer science, compared to just five in arts and culture (and that is a broad designation). Alongside traditional timed classes, which run as long as twelve weeks, edX has also begun to experiment with self-paced courses, of which there are far fewer choices (21 options at last count).

My survey suggests that a handful of universities dominate the edX catalog. For example, faculty at Harvard produced four of the five available Humanities courses. There was a bit more variety in the sciences, where faculty at Harvard, MIT, Rice, Cornell, UC Berkeley, and UT Austin produced classes.

Searching for courses is a delight with edX’s tag-based search engine. Each time you make a selection, edX adds a tag to the top of the page. Either of the tags I used to search for classes in the humanities (Current and Arts and Culture) could be removed at any time. You can also search for a particular course type, including new offerings in professional education or high school, classes compatible with the edX mobile apps, as well as those that join a sequence (XSeries) or offer verified proof of enrollment (Verified Certificates).

Founded in 2010, Udemy is one of the larger online education offerings available to the aspiring coder. Within our review, we found that they allows instructors to create material specific to the subject matter they are experts in and upload it, charging a fee for use. Anyone who is an expert in a topic can create a series of instructional material and upload it, often times in chapters.

This means you get an extremely wide variety of topics from which to choose from development and coding to business, law, and even music lessons. Udemy has tens of thousands of courses and 6 million students currently enrolled in coursework. For the purposes of our review, we will stick with the coding and programming track, focusing on hard programming and web and mobile development.

The biggest difference between Udemy and any of the other course offerings online is its structure. Other online education facilities use a guided structure and courses to lead you through their paths. Udemy takes an entirely different tack. Their structure is one of a marketplace of learning, not unlike shopping at an e-commerce site.

A prospective student will go to Udemy wanting to study something, and be offered an array of choices on what to study as opposed to one course of study with a linear path. Instead of a singular instructor, a marketplace of instructors is there to meet your needs, and they are ever-changing. The entire model is consumer driven, and is more akin to buying a book from an online retailer such as Amazon than a traditional model of online education. Even a star rating system and consumer reviews flank the course descriptions.

Udemy covers nearly any topic you can think of. From beginner to advanced, their coursework runs the gamut in all topics. There are approximately 35,000 courses available to be had, with the average course price running from $19 to $99.

No formal certifications are offered, but the coursework can be learned at the students’ pace and not a formal classroom setting with regular sessions. Coursework is typically delivered via video and written instruction. Multiple forms of media are used to deliver the lectures and practical material to the student.

About Udemy

Anyone who fancies themselves an expert in subject matter may become an instructor at Udemy, provided they are willing to put in the time and effort to create the coursework. Therefore, it is essential that you look at the ratings and reviews posted by other students of the coursework being offered. Some courses may not fit the bill for you, or may not cover the topic in the way that you want.

As with an on-ground college, the teaching style varies from teacher to teacher, so each learning experience may vary widely from teacher to teacher. When you search for a course, you will be given multiple options to choose from delivered by multiple instructors.

Unlike some online schools, your progress is tracked, and you can leave notes for the instructors, most of which are responsive to their student base.You can take notes through Udemy and review them at any time. Teachers can upload video, PowerPoint, and various other documents for such things as notes, handouts, practical material, and exercises.

What will be delivered depends on the teaching style of the instructor and how they choose to deliver the course. Not all teachers will use the same materials or offer certain things. Your own learning curve will determine the usefulness of the course material and offerings.

Udemy employs a robust search engine that helps you find the coursework you would like to study. Searching for a given topic is easy, and returns the most popular topics first so you will find the courses that people are taking right away instead of having to search through a mixture. You can sort or filter the results even further by choosing to sort by:

• Spoken language
• Age of course
• Student reviews
• Academic level
• Price
• Closed captioning
• Quizzes
• Course Exercises

In addition to the search filters, students can rate the course on a scale from one to five stars, and what they feel is the appropriate knowledge level for attempting the course. These filters make it easy for you to find the course you are looking for, and know that it is a good value and will be worth an attempt before you buy the course. Whether you get a good education from Udemy will depend in part on how much you research the courses and their appropriateness before you commit to them.

You are free to take any course you are willing to pay for, but there is little usefulness in taking a course that is advanced beyond your capabilities. Also, taking a course with more practical work than you have time for can be a recipe for failure as well. The instructor may not be one that you care for. These are all things you can get a feel for from the student reviews and ratings as well as the detailed notes.

Business Courses

In this course you will learn how organizations create, capture, and maintain value, and how it is fundamental for sustainable competitive advantage. You will be able to better understand value creation and capture, and learn the tools to analyze both competition and cooperation from a variety of perspectives, including the industry level (e.g., five forces analysis), and the firm level (e.g., business models and strategic positioning).

• Understand how managers coordinate different functional areas, resources, and systems inside a company and align them with the external environment to enhance overall performance
• Knowledge of strategic management tools and frameworks, and apply them to real business contexts Process diverse business and industry information to diagnose strategic issues, evaluate strategic alternatives, and formulate a coherent and actionable strategic plan
• How to think like a CEO, entrepreneur, or general manager.
Course Orientation
You will become familiar with the course, your classmates, and our learning environment. The orientation will also help you obtain the technical skills required for the course.

Module 1: Leading Strategically
The Leading Strategically module will lay the foundation of business strategy course. You will learn about mission, vision and values and their role in overall strategy landscape. You will learn about the VARS framework for analyzing business models and SWOT framework for understanding the fit and coherence of business strategy.

Module 2: External Analysis
The Environmental Analysis module will focus on a key aspect of business strategy – analyzing and understanding the external environment of a firm. You will learn about the macro-environment of firms and the PESTEL framework for macro-environmental analysis. You will also learn about firms’ industry environment and understand how to predict industry profitability by using the 5-forces framework.

Module 3: Internal Analysis and Competitive Advantage
The module on Internal Analysis and Competitive Advantage will provide an in-depth understanding of the origins of unique company strengths and how they can produce a competitive advantage. You will learn about the origins and consequences of fundamental internal differences among firms using the analytical viewpoints of activities, resources, and capabilities. You will be introduced to the strategic tools of value chains, value networks, and the V-R-I framework to help you analyze the implications of these within-firm differences for (sustained) competitive advantage.

Module 4: Strategic Positioning and Strategic Renewal
The Strategic Positioning and Strategic Renewal module brings together the internal and external aspects of strategic analysis to formulate an overall strategy for the firm. You will learn about the two main “generic strategies” that businesses can pursue, which can be complemented by broad or narrow scope to yield four key types of strategic positioning. You will also learn about “dual” strategies and why and how a firm’s strategy must be adapted to strategically renew its positioning.

Pros

• You have access to the best teacher in nearly any field.
• With Coursetalk (mooc rating), you can see if a course is really awesome
• There are usually lots of information about what will the course be about
• You can drop out anytime (this allow you to quickly test lots of course)
• It somehow desmistify the hardness of world first university. (the course are hard, for sure, but the teacher are daam good)
• It’s basically free

Cons

• Course are usually based on video, which mean, you need a good Internet connection, but most importantly, it has its own pace. It miss an handout.
• You always sign up for a long adventure. Sometimes, you just want to see the basics of a domain, not to prepare yourself to become an expert.
• It miss peer to peer collaboration. The forum is great, but it’s often a small minority who participate