World class universities’ free courses for Pakistani people

Sidra Batool wanted to have a career in videography and photography but she had no money to get proper training to polish her skills and compete with experienced photographers. She contacted the National College of Arts and some other private institutions to enroll in short related courses but could not make to them because of odd timing and higher charges. Sidra, being a schoolteacher, hardly found time and energy to reach the NCA at 2pm to attend the class when her school would be over at 2pm. She gave up the idea of becoming a videographer and photographer.

This was back in 2008.

In 2018 she learnt advanced techniques of videography and photography from famous videographers of the world and also has earned a certificate.

Sidra did so without spending even a single penny, and the completed courses at her own pace and convenience.

“If you have a computer and an Internet connection and can read and write English, you can have access to free online courses from world’s renowned universities,” says Sidra, who is now a multimedia director with a news website, and earns a salary in six figures.  

Sidra’s niece Fatima is an O level student. While her class fellows would spend almost Rs 40,000 to Rs 60,000 per month on tuition of math, chemistry, biology, physics and even history, Fatima found plenty of tutorial material on Khan Academy, a free online course website, where lessons on school subjects are offered free of cost. She did all elusive math problems with the help of Khan Academy video lessons.

During the lockdown stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic, people all over the world had plenty of time for being at home, and they took such courses to grow their knowledge as well.

While students and adult learners may find a good number of educational and vocational videos, the basic difference between the course websites and Youtube lessons is that dedicated online courses offer a complete package – course material (reading, videos, assignments, interactive discussion forums, interaction with teachers and combined projects, etc.) whereas Youtube videos only offer a one-way lecture on a topic with a limited scale.

In 2013, I met Bilal Musharraf, the son of retired General Pervez Musharraf  in Doha at one of the world’s biggest annual events on education — WISE (World Innovation Summit for Education) 2013 where he delivered his presentation on ‘Education for anyone, anywhere’. At that time, he was the Dean of Translation with US-based Khan Academy. This is the time I came to know about this a not-for-profit website that aims at changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere. Since then, I have been tracking online course programmes and have completed more than 100 online courses on language, journalism, parenting, history, online marketing, public speaking, research and so on. These courses were offered by US universities.

Based on my consistent chase of the online education world, here I offer a list of recommended high quality sites that offer free courses.

KHAN ACADEMY

  Since 2004, the site has uploaded more than 100,000 lessons on mathematics, history, healthcare, medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, macroeconomics, microeconomics, computer science, and even history and art. These videos have been watched more than 1,000 million times. More than 10 million learners use the website every month from 200 countries and more than a billion practice exercises have been solved on the platform. The website has translated and uploaded more than 1,000 videos in Urdu on YouTube.

COURSERA

 The website with American and European universities and organizations offer four to six weeks courses on a wide variety of topics.

OPEN CULTURE ONLINE COURSES

The site has thousands of lectures, videos and podcasts from universities around the world, such as England, Australia, Wales and many state universities around the United States.

UDEMY

Udemy’s free courses offer access to customized courses where learners can work with top professors and schools. The content is of top quality which can be accessed free as well. Advanced courses are offered on payment.

 

There is a long list: Academic Earth, edX, Alison (highly recommended), iTunesU Free Courses, Harvard, Open Yale Courses, UC Berkeley Class Central, MIT OpenCourseWare, Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative, Codecademy, Code, University of London Podcasts, University of Oxford Podcasts, BBC Podcasts, TED-Ed, LessonPaths, Memrise, National Geographic Kids, and Fun Brain.

Pakistani online influencer Rehan Allahwala (http://www.rehanschool.com/) and Pakistani-American entrepreneurial guru Muhammad Siddique (https://gsefoundation.org/) have also brought about great changes to many lives through their Pakistan-only programs.

Once you have read this piece, browse a couple of sites mentioned above, enroll in one program of your interest and take your first step towards online education. Good luck!

 

About the online world

Most of the talent of Pakistan remains undetected thanks to the lack of opportunities, mentorship, exposure and connectivity with the right people. 

The online world is one such untapped area, where the youth could have several opportunities to learn new skills and earn foreign exchequers. Though Pakistan’s telecom industry has shown unprecedented growth and the advent of the cheap smartphone has revolutionized the connectivity regime and access to the virtual world. Though no structured and reliable data on access to smartphone and the Internet is available, it can be said with an educated certainty that a large majority of the Pakistani individuals and most of the Pakistani households have an easy access to the mobile phone (or smartphone) and the Internet. 

The development, however, has yet to be translated into some meaningful sectoral venture. Go to any public place, workplace or private place, one finds people in groups or individually are glued to their phones and often using the social media. The magic of social media has shrunk the world and often triggered public movements, such as Arab Spring and the Occupy Silicon. Awareness on social and political issues among the public is often directed from the social media. This is, however, one side of the picture. On the side, the youth has failed to fully capitalize the blessings of the online world. Online entrepreneurship has yet to take roots in Pakistan because of the lack of mentoring and government’s and industry's supports. There have been successful ventures related to the online world, such as online selling stores daraz.com, services providing apps like rozee.com and but such success stories can be counted on fingers. Given the volume of the telecom sector growth, the scale of entrepreneurial activities should have been huge, but unfortunately that is not the case.  

It is not that the people are unaware of the importance of the online wealth. Many people start but fail. Many people want to start a startup but cannot because of the lack of guidance, funds and market support. Companies and industries all over the world help startups and mentor them to grow and sustain the growth. This culture is going to take a hard try in Pakistan as Momentum Pakistan’s 2018 edition, to be unveiled on February 18 and 19, will host a big event for startups in Karachi where world giants like Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft will interact with Pakistani startups and mentor them to grow. These giants will also provide resources and tools to the startups. Other than these giants, the Momentum Pakistan will unveil anther big thing – Adapt a Startup – where overseas Pakistanis will adopt a startup and mentor it through guidance and tools. This is the best way to help the country by the successful expatriates.     

Other than the Momentum Pakistan, the Lahore University of Management Sciences and the Plan9 (of the Punjab Information technology Board) and the Global Entrepreneurship Foundation have been helping the startups groom well. These efforts are laudable but the country need more and more such ventures.