Learning online is a great way to add to your qualifications whilst still keeping a full time job, or looking after your family. It is a great option for people who don’t have the time or money to go to regular college courses or nightschool, but there are good courses and bad courses out there! Here’s our guide for finding the perfect online course for you.
Focus on learning by doing: Practical courses are the best way to learn skills, particularly things like programming, or web design for example. There’s not much use just reading about a topic, it won’t necessarily help you understand HOW to do the thing! Think about the skills you want to develop and find courses which have an emphasis on actually doing those skills.
The course gets you in front of employers – For an online course to be really effective, it needs to directly connect the learner with the tools they need to gain employment. This could be vocational skills, it could be actual employers or simple job ideas which could benefit from that course.
Less like lectures, more like tutorials – most online courses are made up of lots of reading followed by testing that knowledge. This is ok, but it is better if the course offers a mix of lecture style reading, videos and clips which can help the learner to really dig into the topic.