The Best Learning and Education Resources are all Free!

TED Talks

TED's mission statement begins:

We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we're building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other.

TED (conference) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

TED addresses a wide range of topics within the research and practice of science and culture. The speakers are given a maximum of 18 minutes to present their ideas in the most innovative and engaging ways they can. Past presenters include Bill Clinton, Jane Goodall, Malcolm Gladwell, Al Gore, Richard Dawkins, Bill Gates, educator Salman Khan, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and many Nobel Prize winners.

Since June 2006, TED Talks have been made available online on the websites of TED, YouTube, and iTunes and since late 2009, there have been free apps for iOS (iPhone, iPad), Android, webOS and Windows Phone 7.

You can start with the Most Popular TED talks

Harvard Business Review – offers the following for free

Internet (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

• HBR blog 
• 3 free articles per month from Harvard Business Review on signing up for free. You’ll get a monthly email as soon as the next issue is published and you will be able to read any three articles of your choice.
• Monthly email newsletters on innovation, best practices, technology etc.
• Daily Management tip  - for every management ad you’ll have to put up with two email ads.

Khanacademy

Bug Report screenshot for Khan Academy (Photo credit: syvwlch)

 With a library of over 3,000 videos covering everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and 315 practice exercises, Khanacademy is on a mission to help you learn what you want, when you want, at your own pace. Major topics covered are-

• Math
• Brain Teasers
• Science
• Healthcare and Medicine
• Physics
• Humanities & Other History

• Test Prep

Khanacademy is also available as an IPad app.

Teacher and administrators can explore Teacher Resources

MIT Open CourseWare - is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to put all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, partly free and openly available to anyone, anywhere. As of November 2011, over 2080 courses were available online. While a few of these are limited to chronological reading lists and discussion topics, a majority provided homework problems and exams (often with solutions) and lecture notes. Some courses also include interactive web demonstrations in Java, complete textbooks written by MIT professors, and streaming video lectures.

logo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

• OCW video and audio files are provided in full for offline downloads on iTunesU and the Internet Archive.

• OCW introduced an iPhone App called LectureHall

• Check out  the RSS feed of new courses

 

Other Valuable Sources

List of free educational video websites

TED- Ed - TED-Ed's mission is to capture and amplify the voices of great educators around the world. They do this by pairing extraordinary educators with talented animators to produce a new library of curiosity-igniting videos.

Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Project Gutenberg- has the largest collection of out of print and out of copyright books. It is now available for download an epub which is an mp3 like standard for reading books on any digital device like a tablet or smartphone. 

Get started by checking out the most popular books and download them from here

Virtual Labs – is a project initiated by the Government of India with the objective of using the Internet to make up for the inadequate laboratory infrastructure in colleges in the State, with particular focus on rural colleges. 91 lab experiments, covering nine broad areas, have been developed by 12 institutes from across the country. Apart from seven Indian Institutes of Technology (Delhi, Bombay, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras, Roorkee and Guwahati), International Institute for Information Technology-Hyderabad, Amrita University, Dayalbagh University, National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK), and College of Engineering, Pune, developed the experiments that were subsequently uploaded. 

Check it out on  www.vlab.co.in

Last but definitely one of the best- Wikipedia

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia contains more than 20 million articles in 282 languages. The parent company, Wikimedia Foundation also runs the following free initiatives:

Image via CrunchBase

• Wikibooks contains a collection of free educational textbooks and learning materials.

• Wikimedia Commons contains a free to use repository of images, sounds, videos and general media, containing over 12 million files.

• Wikiversity contains several educational and research materials and activities

• Wikimedia India is the Indian edition of Wikimedia.