Today everything is online, so why should not be the education? The premise „nowadays, you can find everything within a few google searches“ is positively correct, so you don’t have to worry about buying expensive books anymore, rearranging your time to fit the timetable of the lectures and most important you can take the same lectures over and over again. These are millions of lectures, videos, and blogs, free or paid, ready for you to expand your horizons or learn something completely new.

Online learning platforms provide you to gain unlimited knowledge from spheres that you are interested in and that can help you grow yourself as well as your business. Online learning platforms have experienced incredible growth in the last few years, especially after Covid-19. The unbreakable piece of evidence is the increasing number of people becoming interested in online learning – either to learn a new skill or to teach online.

What is an Online Learning Platform?

An online learning platform is an information system that provides a safe learning environment where anyone can take online courses. For decades, education was related to strict classrooms with whiteboards and uncomfortable desks. Now, people of all ages and experience levels have far more options, including online courses. Online education comes in so many shapes and sizes and we have an endless amount of opportunities to learn new things.

Advantages of free online training platforms

Whenever you pay for a course – you will to finish it, wheater you are eager to learn or not, you will finish it because you paid for it and you don’t what your money to parish. But, when lectures are free, besides learning something new you develop a different side of yourselves. Free online training platforms help people develop discipline, accountability, and time management, and most important foster personal growth and development. The Wingate platform will help you through it.

Free online training platforms reduce the pressure you could have while taking expensive, paid courses, and give you the possibility to study according to your learning style. Without previously mentioned pressure, continued learning keeps your brain doing what it does best: thinking. A benefit of free online classes is that you can work your brain out anytime, anywhere as long as you have an internet connection.

A great example of a free online course platform is the Google Analytics Academy. Google provides anyone to learn analytics with free online courses. Analytics Academy helps you learn about Google’s measurement tools so that you can grow your business through intelligent data collection and analysis. This is a very smart move because Google learns you for free how to create campaigns and put much more money while creating campaigns on Google. This is a real win-win situation.

On the other hand, the advantage of free online course platforms lies in the situation that maybe you just want to pursue a hobby or interest, or expand your career horizons and if the courses weren’t free – you would never enroll and gained the priceless knowledge.

In the end, sometimes you will not be satisfied with the lecturer or knowledge that you gained during the paid courses and you could lose hope of enrolling in another one. So, try out different free online platforms and find one that suits you the best.

Best online training platform examples

There are numerous online learning platforms and depending on their advantages and disadvantages you can decide which one fits your requirements the best.

The Best 5 Online Learning Platforms of 2022:

  1. LinkedIn Learning (Lynda) – offers over 15,000 courses in 7 languages and focuses on helping individuals invest in their professional development.
    1. Pros:
  1. Highly recognizable and valued in the B2B community
  2. Offers certification upon course completion
  1. Cons:
    1. Expensive
    2. The quality of the courses is ambiguous, needs course research before enrolling
  1. Udemy – has over 40 million students and 50 thousand instructors and subject matter experts creating online courses.
    1. Pros:
  1. Geared towards self-paced learning and video courses
  2. No need for highly technical knowledge
    1. Cons:
  1. Very limited interaction with students
  2. The quality of the courses is ambiguous, needs course research before enrolling
  1. Coursera – a platform with 23 million users, that is dedicated to offering high-quality online training courses worldwide.
    1. Pros:
  1. Offers a variety of learning options and activities
  2. Awards students with different types of certificates and degrees
    1. Cons:
  1. Courses may require users to have prior knowledge of the subject
  2. Expensive for degrees that take 2-4 years to complete
  1. Skillshare – has more than 4 million students and up to 24,000 lessons in various disciplines.
    1. Pros:
  1. Offers a supportive discussion forum where students exchange feedback
  2. Provides the ability to take many courses for the same price
    1. Cons:
  1. Class content limited to only four categories
  2. No certificate of completion or any other formal recognition
  1. edX & Open edX – has powered over 8,000 online courses from 100 prestigious universities and businesses that are currently offering higher education in many disciplines.
    1. Pros:
  1. App available on iOS and Android
  2. Interactive online classes, allowing students to chip in
    1. Cons:
  2. Discussion forums seem to be outdated and difficult to navigate

The advice – check them all and find one which will give you the best cost-benefit score.

How can a business benefit from an online training platform

Maybe you will ask yourself if the online training platforms can benefit your business?

Many modern organizations and entrepreneurs have discovered that training through online courses helps to lower costs, increases productivity, and ultimately boosts revenue. The maintenance costs of an online training platform are minimal when compared to expenses with face-to-face classes.

Online training platforms are in a constant state of update as the market changes at the speed of light, so more up-to-date courses will appear. This requires a learning program that is agile enough to reflect these changes almost in real-time.

By stepping into learning platforms, you access the community of people with the same learning or business goals and together you can interact, and exchange questions, and ideas. That community allows you to get answers and different opinions on various questions about the prospect of your business.

Also, if you already know in which field you want to improve your knowledge in, online training platforms provide different courses that target only the specific field that you want to perfect.

So the answer is yes! The only constant is the change, and the change is self- and business development.

Successful people who learned via online platforms

Nowadays, a lot of successful people are eager to share their experiences gained via online platforms and throughout their business paths. Examples are numerous but here we point out André Eikmeier, Founder of Good Empire, Jessica Osborn, Founder & Chief Content Creator at Jessica Osborn Coaching, Marketing Strategy, Kate Toon, Founder of The Stay Tooned Group, and Marijana Marinković, Founder of „How to…?“ educational platform.

Besides entrepreneurs, famous people who finished education online are Steven Spielberg, Venus Williams, Shaquille O’Neal, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Marcia Cross.

To sum it up

In the light of Nelson Mandela’s words “Education is the most powerful weapon you can choose to change the world”, we invite you to check out the training materials which will be available on Wingate’s free online learning platform.

The only question remaining is this: Will you become a part of it and explore the limitless knowledge and experience exchange that the Wingate platform will provide?