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Article: Published 12 May 2015 ©Gavin J Howell
By Gavin J Howell (MSCEng, UCT)
UCT students and staff have an extensive range of Free online courses available to them – bewilderingly extensive actually. To register for these free courses in many cases is as easy as logging on with your UCT username and password.
Hello Lynda!: For example, try out: http://lynda.uct.ac.za/ to access thousands of free online courses offered by Lynda.com, an organization with which UCT has a license to offer its students and staff a variety of short video courses absolutely for free, virtually on any topic from 3D-Animation right through to JavaScript in Web Design and everything else in between. On completion of any free course on Lynda.com you are eligible to receive an official course completion certificate. These free courses may help you in your exam preparations, also if you lack specific knowledge within a field or even if you want to investigate a particular field of knowledge before you select an elective course at UCT.
In fact, I tried out Lynda.com myself and found it amazingly straightforward, nothing to it, just log on and away you go on the course – as simple as that. Quinton Mauritz, Information Clerk for the UCT Postgraduate Center at Otto Beit vouches for Lynda after he tried out its course on cybersecurity completely for free and simply by logging on with his UCT username and password. He also reminds us that these free online courses do not subtract from your undergraduate allocated data quota – Yeah! Now we’re talking. Giddyup Lynda!
Hey guys, pass the MOOC please…….
A MOOC?!! What the heck is that? Must be something to do with the new MPhil in Space studies – right?
Wrong! MOOCs are the new rage in Free Online Courses constructed by leading international universities (including UCT of course). Janet Small, Course Developer at the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (http://www.cilt.uct.ac.za/cilt/moocs-project-uct) has this to say about “MOOCing”:
“The place to go here is www.class-central.com” says Janet. “It is like a general directory on MOOCing, where you can select your MOOC from an exhaustive variety of free online courses dealing with almost any subject.” Janet further adds that: “MOOCs are a different species of free online course to Lynda.com and are way more interactive with the option of engaging in discussion forums and the like. It is free unless you want a certificate, in which case you will pay only for the certificate. MOOCs are particularly of interest to postgraduate students.” Check out UCT’s very own MOOC – “What is a Mind?”, starting soon!.
And then, as if this wasn’t enough free stuff, there is also the option of enrolling for all the Microsoft Academy courses at: https://itacademy.microsoft.com. Here you will need to “redeem your new learning plan enrollment code” to access every free UCT licensed course and this can be done at: http://www.icts.uct.ac.za by following the “training links”.
As far as I can tell, this is all great news for students. The only drawback that I found is that sometimes with registration in these free courses you may need to be aware of personal security issues when some of these courses ask you to register with your Facebook details and then inquire of you whether you mind if they have access to all your contacts’ details too…..well, Ahem…..I’ll leave you to figure.
Go have fun and MOOC your Lynda, all for free at UCT. Thanks to UCT for all its efforts to provide free online learning.
MOOC – Massive Open Online Courses.
Gavin is an Engineering Consultant and Creative Writer
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ReplyDeleteHi, thank you very much for help. I am going to test that in the near future. Cheers.
Online Animation Course
Ok Jenn. Pleasure. Gavin.
ReplyDelete