Introduction

Goldman Sachs has released a series of 10 short courses in their 10,000 Women series. They are also available in Spanish, Portuguese, and Hindi. I have taken three courses so far and here are my reviews.

Fundamentals of Business Finance

This course really opened my eyes to see all my previous losses, what I did wrong and how to improve in my business. The confidence of accountability I have now in my business is a result of this course.

Fundamentals of Leadership

This course made me identify my mission and vision statement, also knowing my core values for my business.

This course really made me read and understand what I actually want in a business, how I want my environment to be, and how I intend to make my staff feel while working for me. This course is everything any business owner needs to go through.

With this course, you will have the need to get to actually know your staff: how to place them and rate their performance as they work for you; Giving them room to discuss and showcase their talents and their opinions really matters in a business. I always have this slogan I use when advising business owners: “The way you treat your staff will determine the rate at which they will help to grow your business. 75% of staff will always want positive results for their employer’s business while 25% will just want to work and earn a salary not minding how the business succeeds.” Treating your staff right can help save your business in the sense that nobody wants to lose the job they value and get treated right.

To conclude, every business owner needs to embark on self discovery to find their purpose and they should also work on their expectations.

Grow Your Business

This course will make you see the need for growth in your business and work towards it. You will source for funds to expand your business in all areas.

I came across this course and decided to go for it because the little business I run doesn’t get a good turnover so I needed to generate more ideas for growth. Having an opportunity in the business helps maximize your growth potential. With this course, you will be able to select a growth opportunity alongside preparing you to generate ideas for more growth opportunities.

What’s next

I plan to take more courses in the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women series.

The post Review of Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Courses appeared first on The Report by Class Central.

In this guide, I’ve selected the 10 best free and paid Japanese online courses for you from the 40+ Japanese courses on our catalog by following a well-defined methodology that you can find below.

But if you want to jump straight to the results, here are my top 10 picks. You can click on a course to jump to the corresponding section:

What is Japanese (Language)?

Japanese (日本語, Nihongo) is the native language primarily spoken by the people of Japan where it is the national language. Japanese belongs to the Japonic or Japanese-Ryukyuan language family.

Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji

The Japanese language uses three scripts: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Let’s take a quick look at each of them.

Hiragana is used to write functional words and particles. Hiragana is like the basic Japanese alphabet and consists of 46 characters.

Katakana is used to write foreign words and names. Katakana is almost exactly the same as Hiragana with 46 characters except that it is written slightly differently.

Kanji is used to write native Japanese words or words of Chinese origin. Kanji characters represent an idea or concept and act more like entire words than individual letters. There are over 2,000 Kanji characters!

Japanese Proficiency Test: JLPT

The Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), offered by the Japan Foundation and Japan Educational Exchanges and Services, is the largest-scale Japanese-language test in the world. It is held worldwide to evaluate and certify proficiency in Japanese of non-native speakers. Language proficiency is tested on the basis of reading and listening, as well as vocabulary and grammar.

The JLPT has five levels, N1, N2, N3, N4 and N5, the level of difficulty increasing from N5 to N1. Below is a summary of the linguistic competence required for each level as described by JLPT.

Why are Japanese Skills Important?

Among the many reasons to learn Japanese there are a few that stand out: Being able to communicate with over 125 million native speakers (Japanese is the 8th most spoken language in the world), enjoying one of the most popular cultures in the world with its unique cuisine, music and movie industry, and most importantly, animes in their original language. These are more than enough reasons to convince any language aficionado to get started learning Japanese. 

In addition to that, Japan is also known for its tech and automobile industry, bringing to the world a number of large Japanese companies (such as Nintendo, Toyota, Canon, Sony, etc.) that carry in their core a strong culture attached to Japan roots.

And lastly, if you want to open up to a number of opportunities as a Japanese translator or interpreter to your own language, there are hundreds of job openings on Indeed, Upwork and LinkedIn. You can also work as a language instructor or even diversify your reach as a tour guide and help Japanese travelers visiting your country.

What is My Experience with Japanese?

I’ve learned a bit of Japanese mainly from anime, J-pop and Japanese movies. As my interest grew, I started learning more about Japan in general, so I became familiar with how Japanese actually works in the real world. Hearing real people talk gave me more enthusiasm to learn the language and explore the country as well.

Besides that, I am a Guided Project Instructor and a Beta Tester at Coursera, having tested many courses before they’re officially launched. I have taken over 50 online courses in various subjects.

My experience as an online learner and teacher has given me some perspective on what to look for in an online course. I used my experience to evaluate each course in this list.

Course Ranking Methodology

I built this ranking following the now tried-and-tested methodology I used in previous rankings (you can find them all here). It involves a three-step process:

1. Research: I started by leveraging Class Central’s database with 100K online courses and 200K+ reviews. Then, I made a preliminary selection of 40+ Japanese courses by rating, reviews, and bookmarks.
2. Evaluate: I read through reviews on Class Central, Reddit, and course providers to understand what other learners thought about each course and combined it with my own experience as a learner.
3. Select: Well-made courses were picked if they presented valuable and engaging content and they have to fit in a set of criteria and be ranked accordingly: comprehensive curriculum, release date, affordability, ratings and enrollments.

The end result is a unique selection of courses that combines a decade of Class Central data and my own experience as an online learner to try to get the best of both worlds. So far, I’ve spent more than 10 hours building this list, and I’ll continue to update it.

Course Ranking Statistics

Here are some statistics regarding this course ranking:

• Combined, these courses have accrued over 197K enrollments.
• 5 courses are free or free-to-audit and 5 courses are paid.
• The most-represented course provider in the ranking is Udemy, with 5 courses.
• 8 courses are in English and 2 courses are in Japanese (subtitles available).
• The Japanese subject is followed by over 2.4K learners on Class Central, and accounts for over 40 courses in Class Central catalog.

So without further ado, let’s get to my picks for the best Japanese online courses.

1. Easy Japanese (NHK WORLD-JAPAN)

My first pick for the best Japanese online course is a collection of free courses Easy Japanese | NHK WORLD-JAPAN, offered by NHK WORLD-JAPAN.

Easy Japanese is a free, 48-part series offered in 18 languages that teaches Japanese communication skills through fun conversations that form a story. There are 7 characters in this story who will help you learn handy and easy-to-use phrases for self-introductions, shopping, etc, as well as tourist information and Japanese culture and manners.

What You’ll Learn

You’ll learn how to understand basic expressions in everyday conversations, conduct simple daily conversations on familiar topics such as asking for directions, presenting yourself, talking about friends and family, buying things, basic travel conversation, food related expressions and vocabulary, talking about your health, asking for permission, and much more.

How You’ll Learn

Each lesson includes a minute long conversation, 3-minute long video explanation, 10-minute long podcast, transcript for all audio-visual content, vocabulary, practice activities, interactive quiz, one kanji, culture and trip tips. You can track your progress as well.

One Thing to Note

This series is designed for JFS A1-A2 level learners. A1 learners can understand basic expressions in everyday life and engage in very simple daily conversations. A2 learners can conduct simple daily conversations on familiar subjects.

Fun Facts

• NHK has a total of 10 Japanese courses from Elementary to Intermediate, you can check their full catalog here.
• This course was originally recorded in English.
• When selecting a different language, you will access a dubbed version of the skits and explanation besides all the resources in the selected language.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the courses and how to enroll here.

2. Complete Japanese Course: Learn Japanese for Beginners (Udemy)

My second pick for the best Japanese online course is Complete Japanese Course: Learn Japanese for Beginners on Udemy.

If it’s your dream to travel to Japan and communicate with the locals, then this comprehensive course is for you! Packed with elaborate lessons and lots of practice opportunities, this course will help you master the basics of Japanese fast. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to pronounce words correctly, structure basic sentences and make daily conversations with ease.

What You’ll Learn

In this course, you’ll learn useful vocabulary words and phrases for everyday situations, Japanese pronunciation, how to put basic sentences together, read and write in Japanese, order foods and drinks, and pronounce words correctly without hearing them first.

You’ll also learn how to greet people and introduce yourself both formally and casually, get around in the public transport and in the airport, and the building blocks of Japanese grammar.

How You’ll Learn

The course is broken down into 12 sections. Each section involves about 2 to 10 hours of work. Concepts are taught through a combination of video lectures and practice video exercises.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

3. Japanese Language Lessons (JapanSocietyNYC)

My third pick for the best Japanese online course is the free course Japanese Language Lessons, offered by JapanSocietyNYC on YouTube.

This is the shortest course on this list. Within a matter of just a couple of hours, this free course will teach you the basic elements of Japanese conversations such as words, simple phrases, basic grammar, sentence connections, and much more with an interactive instructor.

What You’ll Learn

In this course, you’ll learn Japanese greetings, numbers, particles, verbs, adjectives, invitations, conjugations, simple phrases, sentence connections, different forms, and many more.

How You’ll Learn

The course is broken down into 24 videos. Each video involves about 5 to 10 minutes of work. Concepts are taught through video lectures only.

Fun Facts

• According to the JapanSociety.org, “Japan Society was founded on May 19, 1907 by a group of prominent New York business people and philanthropists, many of whom shaped the policies of exchange and collaboration that guided the Society until the outbreak of World War II. After the war, activities slowly resumed, and the stewardship of John D. Rockefeller 3rd from 1952 to 1978 led to a unified vision, a firm financial foundation, and a revitalized mission that continues to inspire and sustain the organization today.”
• Founded in 1972, Japan Society’s Language Center is the premiere venue for learning Japanese in New York City.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

4. Online Japanese N5 Course(All 15 lessons) (Udemy)

My fourth pick for the best Japanese online course is Online Japanese N5 Course(All 15 lessons) on Udemy.

This comprehensive course will teach you JLPT N5 level vocabulary, expressions, grammar and entry-level business Japanese. There’s also a generous amount of practice quizzes throughout the course. By the end of this course you’ll be able to comprehend Hiragana and Katakana, as well as read common phrases and sentences written in N5 level Kanji.

What You’ll Learn

In this course, you’ll learn the basics of writing and pronunciation of Japanese vocabulary, expressions and grammar related to the JLPT N5 level, basic greetings used in daily life, Hiragana and Katakana, common phrases and sentences written in N5 level Kanji, and short simple conversations in daily life.

How You’ll Learn

The course is broken down into 16 sections. Each section involves about 1 to 1.5 hours of work. Concepts are taught through a combination of videos, readings and quizzes. Downloadable resources are also provided.

One Thing to Note

Even though the medium of instruction of this course is Japanese, in-built English subtitles and translations are provided.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

5. Japanese Course for Absolute Beginners (Letters, Alphabet) (Udemy)

My fifth pick for the best Japanese online course is Japanese Course for Absolute Beginners (Letters, Alphabet) on Udemy.

As its name suggests, this course is made for absolute beginners starting out with Japanese learning. This course is designed to teach you Hiragana and Katakana, as well as make basic conversations in Japanese. You’ll build a strong foundation in elementary Japanese, use common everyday Japanese phrases, and learn about Japanese culture.

What You’ll Learn

In this course, you’ll learn Japanese characters: Hiragana and Katakana system, Japanese writing system, elementary Japanese, pronunciation and intonation system in Japanese, most commonly used phrases for greetings in daily life, and Japanese culture and daily life.

How You’ll Learn

The course is broken down into 14 sections. Each section involves about 15 minutes to 1 hour of work. Concepts are taught through a combination of videos and downloadable resources.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

6. Learn Japanese for Beginners: The Ultimate 100-Lesson Course (Udemy)

My sixth pick for the best Japanese online course is Learn Japanese for Beginners: The Ultimate 100-Lesson Course on Udemy.

Consisting of 100 lessons, this course will give you step by step guidance on speaking, writing and understanding Japanese. Moreover, you’ll be able to sound like a native with pronunciation lessons, and also acquire Japanese listening comprehension skills. There’s also a dedicated amount of quizzes throughout the course after each lesson to test your understanding.

What You’ll Learn

1. Introduction to Japanese (5 lessons): Japanese grammar, writing and phrases.
2. How to Write in Japanese – Hiragana and Katakana (20 lessons): Hiragana and Katakana characters and how to write them.
3. Ultimate Japanese Pronunciation Guide (25 lessons): Perfect Japanese pronunciation, common mistakes and how to avoid them, and nuances of natives.
4. Basic Japanese (25 lessons): Common vocabulary and phrases, useful conversational phrases, and the basics of Japanese.
5. Japanese Listening Comprehension for Absolute Beginners (20 lessons)
6. Japanese Listening Comprehension for Beginners (20 lessons)

How You’ll Learn

The course is broken down into 6 sections. Each section involves about 30 minutes to 3.5 hours of work. Concepts are taught through a combination of videos, quizzes and downloadable resources.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

7. N1文字語彙 vocabulary for JLPT (日本語の森)

My seventh pick for the best Japanese online course is the free course N1文字語彙 vocabulary for JLPT (日本語の森), offered by 日本語の森 on YouTube.

If you’re already quite skilled in Japanese and want to take it to the final JLPT N1 level, then this free course is for you. Even though this course is fairly short, it will teach you the vocabulary needed for JLPT N1. Within a matter of a couple of hours, you’d have improved your Japanese vocabulary for JLPT N1 with a fun instructor.

What You’ll Learn

In this course, you’ll improve your Japanese vocabulary for JLPT N1. You’ll learn Japanese words, letters and Kanji.

How You’ll Learn

The course is broken down into 10 videos. Each video involves about 15 to 20 minutes of work. Concepts are taught through video lectures only.

One Thing to Note

The medium of instruction for this course is Japanese. So you need to be familiar with Japanese in order to take this course (which is expected since this course is for JLPT N1).

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

8. Japanese for beginners based on MISJ WELCOME PROGRAM (Udemy)

My eighth pick for the best Japanese online course is Japanese for beginners based on MISJ WELCOME PROGRAM on Udemy.

Another fairly comprehensive course on this list, this course is ideal for beginners with no prior experience in Japanese. Whether you’re planning to visit Japan or start your life there, this course will help you gain enough Japanese speaking, reading and writing abilities. You’ll get to learn from a very experienced Japanese instructor and practice with quizzes.

What You’ll Learn

In this course, you’ll learn basic Japanese pronunciation, writing and reading of basic Japanese characters: Hiragana and Katakana, basic grammar for creative speech and writing, sentence-based daily and practical conversation skills, and Japanese background culture.

How You’ll Learn

The course is broken down into 30 sections. Each section involves about 30 minutes to 1.5 hours of work. Concepts are taught through a combination of videos, quizzes and downloadable resources.

Fun Facts

• Iwasaki graduated from Tokyo Women’s Christian College Mathematics BA.
• She made three e-learning programs and one TV program, “Meet & Speak” broadcasted by NHK WORLD.
• She also supervised making a textbook for the TV program NHK EDUCATIONAL broadcasted from 2014 to 2016.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

9. Nihongo Master

My ninth pick for the best Japanese online course are the courses offered by Nihongo Master.

Nihongo Master is a great platform where you can find free podcasts, community, blogs and paid lessons (7 day free trial) for learning Japanese. This site will help you read, write and speak Japanese at a very low cost. Once you’ve subscribed, you can get access to hundreds of Japanese lessons, quizzes and tools to help you get started with Japanese.

What You’ll Learn

There are four difficulty levels that you’ll progress through:

1. Introductory – Read and write Hiragana and Katakana, proper Japanese pronunciation, simple greetings, how to ask questions
2. Beginner – Basics of Japanese grammar, write common Kanji, more Japanese vocabulary, read simple Japanese text
3. Intermediate – More Japanese grammar rules, use Japanese in regular conversation, more than 800 Japanese words and over 200 Kanji
4. Advanced – Improve Japanese fluency, advanced grammar rules, 5000 words and over 2000 Kanji, read, speak and write Japanese in most situations

How You’ll Learn

The course is broken down into 100+ lessons. Each lesson involves 5 minutes of work. Concepts are taught through lessons, quizzes and tools.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the courses and how to enroll here.

10. JLPT N5 (Japanese Ammo with Misa)

My tenth pick for the best Japanese online course is the free course JLPT N5, offered by Japanese Ammo with Misa on YouTube.

This free course will help you get started and learn the necessary grammar and vocabulary for JLPT N5, N4 and N3.

What You’ll Learn

In this course, you’ll learn JLPT N5, N4 and N3 grammar, including adjectives, conjugations, tenses and verbs, as well as vocabulary, Kanji, reading and listening exercises, and much more.

How You’ll Learn

The course is broken down into 24 videos. Each video involves about 15 to 30 minutes of work. Concepts are taught through video lectures only.

Fun Facts

• Misa is an enthusiastic multilingual ninja, eager translator, manga lover, and happy world traveler!
• You can check out her website for more free Japanese lessons.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

The post 10 Best Japanese Courses to Take in 2023 appeared first on The Report by Class Central.

WhatsApp. Cisco. GoDaddy. IBM. Heroku. What do they all have in common?

They all use Erlang in their technology stack!

Erlang is a programming language specifically designed for building scalable, fault-tolerant systems that can run smoothly in a distributed environment. Its unique approach to concurrency and message-passing makes it ideal for building real-time, high-traffic systems like WhatsApp’s messaging platform, Cisco’s networking equipment, GoDaddy’s hosting services, IBM’s cloud offerings, and Heroku’s platform as a service. In fact, 90% of all internet traffic goes through Erlang controlled nodes.

Want to find out and learn more about this (kind of) unknown yet powerful language? Continue reading to see my picks for the best Erlang courses. Click on one to skip to the course details:

What is Erlang?

Erlang is a general-purpose functional programming language and runtime environment developed by Ericsson, a Swedish telecommunications company, in the 1980s. The team needed a programming language that can handle telephone switching — a very difficult endeavor that requires high levels of concurrency and zero downtime (I’m sure you can imagine why).

After experimenting with dozens of different languages, they came to a stark conclusion: no such language exists! Instead of giving up or settling for compromises, they instead decided to create their own programming language.

Hopefully that brief history lesson gave you some context for why Erlang is known for two things: its practical concurrent programming and its robust virtual machine.

Erlang is a functional programming language for all the right reasons — scalability and concurrency. It has a lightweight threading model (which Rust also uses) and a powerful process-based runtime system. Companies like WhatsApp and Heroku are able to scale and handle millions of concurrent connections in real-time thanks to Erlang.

Also, the Erlang virtual machine (BEAM) is legendary for its fault-tolerance. The language has built-in support for handling failures, like automatically restarting processes and recovering from crashes. For mission-critical systems, you can be rest assured that your applications will continue running 24/7 even when things eventually go wrong.

In addition to its concurrency and fault tolerance features, Erlang is also a highly expressive language that allows you to write concise and elegant code. It has a simple syntax and a rich set of libraries, like the Open Telecom Platform, making it easy to learn and use.

Unfortunately, there are not enough developers in the world that know Erlang, even though Erlang developers are highly sought after. That’s why Erlang is the second highest paying programming language to learn (after Clojure) according to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2022. So why not become one of them? Whether you’re building a web application, a real-time messaging system, or a distributed database, Erlang is a worthy choice for building reliable, scalable systems.

Best Courses Guides Methodology

I built this ranking following the now tried-and-tested methodology used in previous Best Courses Guides (you can find them all here). It involves a three-step process:

1. Research: I started by leveraging Class Central’s database with 100K online courses and 200K+ reviews. Then, I made a preliminary selection of Erlang courses by rating, reviews, and bookmarks.
2. Evaluate: I read through reviews on Class Central, Reddit, and course providers to understand what other learners thought about each course and combined it with my own experience as a learner.
3. Select: Well-made courses were picked if they presented valuable and engaging content and they have to fit in a set of criteria and be ranked accordingly: comprehensive curriculum, affordability, release date, ratings and enrollments.

Course Ranking Statistics

Here are some aggregate stats about the ranking:

• Around 100 people are following Erlang Topic on Class Central
• Five of the courses in this ranking are free.
• All except for one course do not require any Erlang or functional programming experience whatsoever.
• Some programming experience with other languages is required to take the courses in this ranking.

Without further ado, let’s go through the top picks.

1. Erlang Tutorial (Erlang Tutorial)

My #1 pick for the best course to learn Erlang is the Erlang Tutorial playlist.

I chose this course as my top pick because it is both recent and comprehensive. Plus, the video tutorials teach Erlang through interactive programming and examples. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have a well-grounded understanding of the Erlang programming language.

Some prior knowledge of programming is required to take this course.

What You’ll Learn

In this tutorial, you’ll start by learning the tools and vocabulary of the Erlang programming language. You’ll write a simple “Hello, World” module and compile it to get a feel for the Erlang syntax and structure. You’ll then delve into common programming concepts such as data types, control structures, and functions, but with a functional and concurrent twist specific to Erlang.

One of the key features of Erlang is its use of processes to execute code concurrently (fun fact, millions of processes can run at the same time!). You’ll learn how to spawn and manage them. Other functional programming concepts will be explored too, such as recursion, anonymous functions, and higher-order functions. Along with other concepts like atoms, comprehensions, and pattern matching, you’ll have the skills to write efficient and scalable code.

In addition to these foundational topics, you’ll study more advanced constructs in Erlang. You’ll learn how to use maps and processes together to build a simple key-value database that can perform basic data operations. You’ll also learn about error handling in Erlang, and how to design your code to continue running even when errors occur. And to give you some practical examples, you’ll implement a palindrome checker and Conway’s game of life in Erlang, giving you the opportunity to apply your knowledge to real-world problems.

How You’ll Learn

This course is 8–9 hours long. You’ll learn by watching the lecture videos and following along with the instructor as he codes interactively using the Erlang shell.

Fun Facts

• Mysteriously, I’m not able to find any information on the author of the playlist, apart from that his name is Michal and that he is Polish.
• He cites Programming Erlang on various occasions in this course.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

2. Erlang Master Classes (University of Kent)

My 2nd pick for the best Erlang course are the Erlang Master Classes from the University of Kent.

This free course comprises three master classes taught by esteemed Erlang programmers (one of them even helped invent Erlang). Each class focuses on different aspects of Erlang — functional programming, concurrent programming, and larger-scale programming with OTP — are used to solve complex real-world problems through case studies and examples. By the end of the course, you’ll know how Erlang is used practically.

The course assumes you have some basic familiarity with Erlang (watch the first video of the first masterclass to know more).

What You’ll Learn

The first master class focuses on language processing in general, with a focus on processing arithmetical expressions in Erlang. This will include how to interpret, compile, and run the expressions on a virtual machine, as well as simplifying and converting them to and from a textual form.

In the second master class, you’ll understand how Erlang does concurrent programming in Erlang through the ‘share nothing’ concurrency model. You’ll learn how to make sequential code concurrent and how to build systems using communicating processes. You’ll also cover Erlang’s famous approach to fault tolerance and how errors can happen while still keeping the program running.

Erlang has a wide ecosystem of tools and libraries — that’s what makes Erlang great. But, the most important tool for servers is arguably the The Open Telecom Platform (OTP). Hence in the final master class, you’ll explore OTP in depth, taking a look at its generic behaviors (such as a generic server) and how it can be used to build complex systems quickly and reliably, in addition to packaging and releasing systems.

How You’ll Learn

The master classes are presented by Joe Armstrong, Ericsson AB and KTH, Stockholm, and one of the inventors of Erlang; Francesco Cesarini, CTO and founder of Erlang Solutions Ltd; and Simon Thompson, functional programming teacher and researcher at the University of Kent. Each Master Class ends with a discussion between the three presenters on some of the issues raised by the Master Class.

Fun Facts

• This MOOC was created to celebrate the university’s 50th anniversary. It highlights the university’s successes and points to where it might go in the future.
• Joe Armstrong is one of the “gang of three” Erlang inventors, and a champion of the Erlang approach to programming large complex systems. He has worked for Ericsson, as well as in startups, and is also professor at KTH, Stockholm.
• Francesco Cesarini is the founder and Technical Director of Erlang Solutions Ltd, the company focused on building scalable, reliable systems based on Erlang / OTP.
• Simon Thompson is a professor of Logic and Computation at the University of Kent. He has been a teacher and researcher in functional programming for most of his career.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

3. Introduction to Erlang Programming (CodeRed)

My third pick for the best Erlang course is Introduction to Erlang Programming.

This paid course is an excellent introduction for programmers looking to master the Erlang language. By the end, you’ll be able to build a system that uses functional concurrent programming to achieve scalability and reliability while still being easy to understand, debug, and maintain.

You’ll need basic programming knowledge and a MacOS or Linux system to take this course.

What You’ll Learn

The course starts by introducing you to the Erlang Shell, where you can get hands-on experience with the language by evaluating expressions and compiling modules. Then, you’ll delve into the world of functional programming in Erlang, including concepts such as pattern-matching and recursion. You’ll see how these functional programming techniques can be combined with concurrent programming to take advantage of Erlang’s efficient concurrency model using message-passing processes.

Next, you’ll cover how to handle errors in your Erlang program, both sequentially and concurrently, to ensure that it can continue running smoothly even in the face of unexpected issues. You’ll also learn about OTP that provides a powerful library and tools for building distributed systems. Finally, the course explores modern Erlang development practices and introduces you to Rebar3, a popular build and package management tool for Erlang.

How You’ll Learn

This course is 4 hours long. You’ll learn by watching the lecture videos chapter-by-chapter, with each chapter ending with a summary.

Fun Facts

• Brujo Benavides Rodriguez is a long-time Erlang developer and trainer. He is a maintainer of multiple open-source projects and a member of the Education Working Group at the EEF. He has also worked as a trainer for 5 years at Inaka and Erlang Solutions, delivering Erlang lessons to individuals and teams around the world.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

4. Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good! (Frederic Trottier-Hebert)

Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good! is a free comprehensive text-based Erlang tutorial, based on another well-received tutorial of similar name, Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!.

It is for people who have basic knowledge of programming in imperative languages but are unfamiliar with functional programming. You’ll explore how Erlang is very pragmatic in its approach to functional programming, and how it results in robust, concurrent, distributed systems.

What You’ll Learn

You’ll start by exploring the basics of the language, like variables, data types, and conditional statements. And since the language follows the functional paradigm, you’ll learn how to solve problems the functional way, using concepts like recursion and higher order functions.

Next, you’ll delve into the concepts of concurrency in Erlang and learn how to use processes, message passing, and other techniques to build concurrent systems. You’ll also learn about OTP (Open Telecom Platform), a set of libraries and tools for building distributed and fault-tolerant systems in Erlang. And this fault-tolerance can only be resolved through smart error and exception handling.

Data structures and algorithms appear everywhere in software, and Erlang is no exception. You’ll use them to solve common problems. You’ll also learn about working with sockets and networking, along with event handlers and supervisors.

Finally, you’ll learn about testing and debugging in Erlang, including how to use tools such as EUnit to test your code and how to release and deploy Erlang applications.

How You’ll Learn

This tutorial consists of 36 chapters. You’ll learn by reading through the many chapters and implementing the code given in the course on your system.

Fun Facts

• Frederic Trottier-Hebert is a French-Canadian working as a site reliability engineer at honeycomb.io. He owns a blog.
• He has also written other books / tutorials like ‘Erlang in Anger’ and ‘Property Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir’.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

5. Erlang University (erlang.org)

Erlang University is the official Erlang course from the Ericsson OTP Team. This free text-based course covers Erlang from its history, to the basics parts of Erlang as well as to the advanced.

However, this course is quite bare, so be sure to supplement this course with other courses, the course’s own exercises, and Erlang’s discussion forums.

Programming experience is needed to take this course.

What You’ll Learn

This course is divided into 5 modules.

First, you’ll take a short look at the history of Erlang to understand and appreciate the motivations and design principles behind its creation. Then, you’ll start with the basics of sequential programming which follows the style of many other languages where code is run on a single thread. This will include learning basic programming concepts as well as Erlang’s functional programming capabilities.

Next, you’ll get to the exciting part of Erlang: concurrent programming. You’ll understand how to use processes, lightweight concurrent units of execution that can run alongside other processes. You’ll also learn how errors can propagate through processes and how to handle them when they occur. Lastly, the course ends by covering a few tricky topics and quirks in the Erlang language.

How You’ll Learn

According to the course description, this course will take 4 days to complete, but that can vary depending on your current skill. You’ll learn by reading through the course modules and completing the exercises to help you put into practice what you’ve learned.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

6. Modern Erlang for Beginners (Roberto Ostinelli)

Modern Erlang for Beginners is a paid Udemy course that provides a simple and concise introduction to Erlang.

To take this course, you should have some experience with another programming language.

What You’ll Learn

You’ll begin by installing and setting up Erlang on your PC, using the IntelliJ IDE. Then, you’ll learn Erlang basics, especially how to think in Erlang, like variables, control structures, data types, and data structure, as well as taking a careful look at functions, guards, and patterns in the context of functional programming.

Erlang is known for its ability to handle concurrent processing, and you’ll learn how it achieves this through processes, messages, and other techniques to build distributed systems. To further illustrate these concepts, you’ll examine a real-world example of a bank system. Finally, you’ll explore how to improve the bank example using the tools and libraries provided by the Open Telecom Platform (OTP) and learn best practices for Erlang development.

How You’ll Learn

This course is 3–4 hours long. You’ll learn by watching the lecture videos, taking notes of the code examples, and completing the course exercises.

Fun Facts

• Roberto Ostinelli is an experienced software developer with over a decade of professional experience using Erlang. He provides training to developers on how to build massively scalable systems using Erlang and Elixir, with a focus on TDD and agile methodologies.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

7. Erlang (Exercism)

Exercism is an excellent resource for improving your coding skills in Erlang. It is a free online coding platform that not only offers a variety of programming challenges and exercises for all skill levels, but it also provides a free mentoring service where you can request personalized feedback from experienced Erlang programmers for a particularly challenging exercise.

What You’ll Learn

The course consists of three difficulties: easy, medium, and hard.

Easy exercises consist of tasks like determining the geometric type of a triangle, finding the prime factors of a number, and implementing basic lists operations.

For medium difficulty exercises, you’ll calculate the date of meetups, add numbers to a  minesweeper board, and detect saddle points in a matrix.

Hard exercises include creating a zipper for a binary tree, returning a square matrix of a number in spiral order, and making a chain of dominoes.

How You’ll Learn

This course is self-paced, so you can take all the time you need to complete the 70+ hands-on programming exercises. Each exercise comes with automatic feedback of your code as well as personal mentoring to help you understand your code’s strengths and flaws.

Fun Facts

• Exercism provides exercises on 50+ programming languages like Python, Kotlin, F#, and even WebAssembly.
• Their mission is to help everyone get really good at programming, regardless of their background, share the love of programming, and help people upskill as part of their upward social mobility.
• Around 60 people have contributed towards the Erlang syllabus and exercises, with over 60 mentors available at the time of writing.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

The post 7 Best Erlang Courses to Take in 2023 appeared first on The Report by Class Central.

In this article, I go over Harvard CS50’s entire course lineup, which in 2023 includes 11 courses — 9 of them with a free certificate of completion.

The CS50 adventure began in 2012 with the launch of CS50, Harvard’s Introduction to Computer Science. Over the years, CS50 grew into a brand encompassing 10 additional courses on topics such as Python, web development, and AI.

Let’s discuss the CS50 lineup, course by course, to help you find the best course for you. And let’s explain how you can earn a free certificate in most of these courses.

CS50: The Original Course

CS50 is taught by Harvard Professor David J. Malan. Back in 2015, when Class Central contributor Charlie Soliman reviewed the course, she said this about Professor Malan:

At the risk of stating a cliché, his approach to teaching is unlike anything I have seen and can easily be labeled as revolutionary. One can detect the joy and effort he puts into each of his lectures.

Having taken the course myself, I can say that this quote is as relevant today as it was back then. In fact, since the course is updated every year, the content has even gotten better. If you’d like to learn more, I’ve written a dedicated article on the course: Harvard CS50 in 2023: How to Get a Free Certificate.

Offered at Harvard since 2007 and on edX since 2012, CS50 has grown to become Harvard’s largest on-campus course, with around 1000 students enrolled every Fall, and one of the world’s highest rated and most popular online courses ever, totalling over 4.3M enrollments.

And “CS50” has evolved from a code designating a single course to a brand encompassing multiple courses exploring different subjects, targeting different audiences, and part of different learning paths.

To make sense of Harvard CS50’s offering, I partly audited each course, I explored their online communities, and I contacted their course staff. I found that Professor Malan often replies to emails himself — a nice touch considering the course has over 100 staff. As CS50 keeps growing, I’ll continue to update this article.

CS50: The Expanded Offering

CS50’s full offering comprises 11 courses that can be broken down into 3 levels, as shown below. As you can see, 9 courses offer a free certificate. Click on a course or level to jump to the corresponding section.

Basic Courses

Currently, CS50 offers two basic courses. These can be seen as optional on-ramps to CS50’s core courses. If you don’t feel ready for a formal introduction to computer science, this is a good place to start.

CS50’s Understanding Technology (CS50T)

CS50T is a gentle introduction to the world of computing. It starts at the hardware level and works its way up from there. It explores how the internet works, how websites are created, and how security is ensured. And it ends with coding basics.

The course is taught by David J. Malan. It involves about 4 hours of study per week over 6 weeks. And it offers the following certificate options:

• Free certificate via Harvard OpenCourseWare
• Paid verified certificate via edX
• Paid transcript and academic credit via Harvard Extension School

The course is also part of edX’s XSeries program in CS50’s AP Computer Science Principles.

CS50’s Introduction to Programming with Scratch (CS50S)

CS50S is a gentle introduction to programming. It focuses on Scratch, a language that makes coding highly visual. Instead of typing text, you combine functional blocks as if they were LEGO pieces to create programs. The course covers all programming fundamentals, including variables, functions, and loops.

The course is taught by Brian Yu. It involves about 6 hours of study per week over 3 weeks. And it offers the following certificate options:

• Free certificate via Harvard OpenCourseWare
• Paid verified certificate via edX

Core Courses

Currently, CS50 offers three core courses. These include the original CS50 as well as variants geared toward different types of learners. This is where most learners want to start. One course should be plenty. But learners that take a variant may want to also take the original CS50 — especially if they plan to continue with a follow-up course.

CS50 Introduction to Computer Science

CS50 is Harvard’s computer science introduction. It starts with binary and goes up the ladder of abstraction from machine code to low-level languages to high-level languages. It explores algorithms, data structures, and memory management. And it ends with one of three specialization tracks: web, game, or mobile development.

The course is taught by David J. Malan. It involves about 12 hours of study per week over 12 weeks. And it offers the following certificate options:

• Free certificate via Harvard OpenCourseWare
• Paid verified certificate via edX
• Paid transcript and academic credit via Harvard Extension School or Harvard Summer School

The course is also part of edX’s professional certificates:

• Computer Science for Web Programming
• Computer Science for Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science for Game Development

If you’d like to learn more, I’ve written a dedicated article on the course: Harvard CS50 in 2023: How to Get a Free Certificate.

CS50’s Computer Science for Lawyers (CS50L)

CS50L is a CS50 variant geared toward lawyers and law students. Part of the curriculum explores similar content but emphasizes big-picture understanding over low-level details. The other part explores entirely new content that considers how law and computer science interact — for instance, in regards to cybersecurity, data privacy, and internet regulation.

The course is taught by David J. Malan and Doug Lloyd. It involves about 4 hours of study per week over 10 weeks. And it offers the following certificate options:

• Free certificate via Harvard OpenCourseWare
• Paid verified certificate via edX
• Paid certificate via Harvard Law School Executive Education

CS50’s Computer Science for Business Professionals (CS50B)

CS50B is a CS50 variant geared toward business professionals. Most of the course explores similar content but emphasizes big-picture understanding over low-level details. A small part explores entirely new content relevant to businesses — for instance, cloud computing.

The course is taught by David J. Malan. It involves about 4 hours of study per week over 6 weeks. And it offers the following certificate options:

• Free certificate via Harvard OpenCourseWare
• Paid verified certificate via edX
• Paid transcript and academic credit via Harvard Extension School or Harvard Summer School

CS50’s Introduction to Programming with Python (CS50P)

CS50P teaches the fundamentals of programming in Python, including variables, functions, loops, and reading and writing files. It draws from real-world programming problems and has plenty of practical exercises.

The course is taught by David J. Malan. It involves about 6 hours of study per week over 9 weeks. And it offers the following certificate options:

• Free certificate via Harvard OpenCourseWare
• Paid verified certificate via edX
• Paid transcript and academic credit via Harvard Extension School (taught by Jeff Parker)

The course is also part of edX’s Professional Certificate in Computer Science for Python Programming.

If you’d like to learn more, I’ve written a dedicated article on the course: Harvard New Intro to Python: How to Earn a Free Certificate.

Follow-Up Courses

Currently, CS50 offers five follow-up courses. These pick up where CS50 leaves off and explore a specific subject. They’re an excellent way to build on your computer science fundamentals by delving into a specialization.

CS50’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence with Python (CS50AI)

CS50AI leverages the Python programming language to explore modern artificial intelligence. It covers foundational AI concepts, such as search algorithms and knowledge models, and builds on them to discuss more advanced concepts, such as optimization and machine learning.

The course is taught by Brian Yu. It involves about 20 hours of study per week over 7 weeks. And it offers the following certificate options:

• Free certificate via Harvard OpenCourseWare
• Paid verified certificate via edX
• Paid transcript and academic credit via Harvard Extension School or Harvard Summer School

The course is also part of edX’s Professional Certificate in Computer Science for Artificial Intelligence.

CS50’s Web Programming with Python and JavaScript (CS50W)

CS50W explores the languages, tools, and processes underpinning modern web app development. It covers languages such as Python and JavaScript, frameworks such as Flask and Django, and services such as GitHub and Heroku.

The course is taught by Brian Yu. It involves about 8 hours of study per week over 12 weeks. And it offers the following certificate options:

• Free certificate via Harvard OpenCourseWare
• Paid verified certificate via edX
• Paid transcript and academic credit via Harvard Extension School or Harvard Summer School

The course is also part of edX’s Professional Certificate in Computer Science for Web Programming.

CS50’s Introduction to Game Development (CS50G)

CS50G explores the languages, tools, and processes underpinning modern game development. It leverages languages such as C# and frameworks such as Unity to create 2D and 3D experiences, and draws examples from video games such as Pong, Mario, and Portal.

The course is taught by Colton Ogden. It involves about 8 hours of study per week over 12 weeks. And it offers the following certificate options:

• Free certificate via Harvard OpenCourseWare
• Paid verified certificate via edX
• Paid transcript and academic credit via Harvard Extension School

The course is also part of edX’s Professional Certificate in Computer Science for Game Development.

CS50’s Mobile App Development with React Native (CS50M)

CS50M explores how to develop mobile apps using the React Native framework. It covers concepts such as state and components, processes such as testing and deployment, and tools such as Redux and JSX.

The course is taught by Jordan Hayashi. It involves about 8 hours of study per week over 13 weeks. And it is offered via Harvard OpenCourseWare but has no certificate.

CS50 Beyond

CS50 Beyond is the precursor of CS50W. It explores the same subject, web development, but does it in a more condensed time frame. Most topics remain the same but most projects are different.

The course is taught by Brian Yu. It involves about 5 hours of study per week over 12 weeks. And it is offered via Harvard OpenCourseWare but has no certificate.

The post Harvard CS50 Guide: How to Pick the Right Course (with Free Certificate) appeared first on The Report by Class Central.

So, you have finished a web development course teaching you HTML and CSS with a small section on CSS Animations that got you extremely excited. You are now wondering: “Where can I learn more about animations and bring life to my next project?”

While searching for CSS Animation, I could hardly find tutorials and wondered if there were people like me, who were stuck looking for Animation tutorials without Javascript. Javascript is great and can be used for complex animations but that requires learning a new programming language again and I just wanted to make subtle animations to make my project more dynamic and engaging.

So, here are a few of my top picks to learn CSS Animation. Click on one to skip to the course details:

What are CSS Animations?

CSS animations is a proposed module for Cascading Style Sheets that allows the animation of HTML document elements using CSS.

Why should you learn CSS Animations when you can create animations using javascript?

CSS Animations are preferred over JavaScript in for several reasons such as:

1. Performance: CSS Animations are typically smoother and faster than JavaScript animations because they are hardware-accelerated and run on the browser’s compositor thread, rather than the main JavaScript thread.
2. Simplicity: CSS Animations are generally simpler to implement and maintain than JavaScript animations. With CSS, you can animate elements with a few lines of code, whereas JavaScript animations require more complex logic and code.
3. Accessibility: CSS Animations can be controlled with CSS and are accessible to users with assistive technologies, such as screen readers. JavaScript animations, on the other hand, may not be accessible to all users.
4. Browser support: CSS Animations have good browser support, meaning they work on most modern browsers. This is not always the case with JavaScript animations, as some browsers may not support certain JavaScript features.

So, let’s learn some Animation with CSS.

Best Courses Guides Methodology

I built this ranking following the now tried-and-tested methodology used in previous Best Courses Guides (you can find them all here). It involves a three-step process:

1. Research: I started by leveraging Class Central’s database with 100K online courses and 200K+ reviews. Then, I made a preliminary selection of 40 courses by rating, reviews, and bookmarks.
2. Evaluate: I read through reviews on Class Central, Reddit, and course providers to understand what other learners thought about each course and combined it with my own experience as a learner.
3. Select: Well-made courses were picked if they presented valuable and engaging content and they have to fit in a set of criteria and be ranked accordingly: comprehensive curriculum, affordability, release date, ratings and enrollments.

Course Ranking Statistics

Here are some aggregate stats about the ranking:

• Over 15k people are following HTML and CSS on Class Central.
• All of the courses in this ranking require a basic knowledge of HTML/CSS.
• 7 of the courses in this ranking are free, free-to-audit, or have free-trial, whereas the rest are paid.
• Most of the courses are suitable for CSS-Animation beginners.

Without further ado, let’s go through the top picks.

1. Hello Animation (HTML Academy)

My first pick is the Hello Animation course offered for free by HTML Academy. The course is a mix of theory and practice. You start with some basic animation and then handle animations of multiple objects simultaneously using keyframes.

By the end of this course you will be familiar with keyframes and creating basic and even some complex animations.

What You’ll Learn

You will learn to rotate, slide, transform simple objects and even send a rocket to space. The course will get you acquainted with keyframes, pre and post animation states and animation timing with 32 practice tutorials.

How You’ll Learn

There is a theoretical side and a practical side to the course, you will first be given some theory to understand the concepts and then move to practicing what you have read in the theory. There are 32 hands-on exercises to get you familiarized with the basics of CSS Animation.

2. Learn CSS Animation with Jad Khalili (Scrimba)

This is a pro course offered by Scrimba. Learn CSS Animation with Jad Khalili is available for free on youtube. You will learn CSS Animation by solving real-world problems when doing front-end development.

The course covers various techniques for adding transitions and customizing them, as well as how to define animations and control timing. The course also teaches different types of transforms, including scaling, translation, rotation, and skew, and how to apply them to elements. Additionally, it covers the use of CSS variables and timing functions to control animation behavior. It also covers the use of prefixes to ensure cross-browser compatibility. You will be able to test and review all that you have learnt in the course with some real world challenges.

What You’ll Learn

The course will teach you transitions, customizing transitions and working on a real world transition challenge. It will then proceed to explain animations and timings in animation with another real world challenge. The last challenge would be to work on a logo with transformations and translations and creating custom timing functions.

How You’ll Learn

You will learn by watching the video and following the material with the instructor.

Fun Facts

• The course is a paid course and is taught interactively on the Scrimba website.
• Scrimba has a Discord Community.
• This course is also available on Scrimba.

3. Level Up Your CSS Animation Skills (Donovan Hutchinson)

This free course was created by Donovan Hutchinson. The course is also available as a paid course with a certificate on Udemy. The course is meant for intermediate CSS learners.

What You’ll Learn

The course covers different types of animations that can be used on websites, including hero headers, touch and hover animations, scroll animations, carousels, and responsive animations. It provides step-by-step instructions on how to create each type of animation, as well as examples that can be downloaded for reference. The article covers topics such as animating backgrounds, introducing titles, adding scroll cues, simplifying keyframes, and using JavaScript to make carousels work. It also discusses how to make animations responsive by using font-size, percentages, and viewport units.

How You’ll Learn

You’ll learn by watching the course video and practicing what the instructor has taught in the video.

Fun Facts

• Donovan has a free Animation book if you want to get the basics cleared.
• He also has a website for CSS Animation
• You can find one of his recent articles here
• If you want the certificate from Udemy you can find it here.

4. CSS Animation Tutorial (The Net Ninja)

This free course is meant for beginners with about 2 hours of learning material from Net-Ninja, with the enthusiastic and straightforward instructor Shaun.

What You’ll Learn

The tutorials cover a wide range of topics, from the basics of CSS animations to more advanced techniques such as transforms, transitions, keyframes and more. These tutorials can help you learn how to create animations that will make your website come to life and stand out from the competition. From mastering animation fill mode and direction, to chaining animations and animating complex elements like pop-ups and shopping carts, these tutorials will give you the tools and knowledge you need to take your web development skills to the next level.

How You’ll Learn

The tutorials are very short with the longest video being 10 minutes.  You’ll learn by watching the course video and practicing what the instructor has taught in the video.

Fun Facts

• The Net Ninja courses are usually highly rated among the best courses on Class Central.
• Shaun is a traveler, musician and a coffee enthusiast.

5. CSS: Animation (Val Head)

Val Head’s free course on Linkedin Learning is one of the first courses in the list to introduce SVG Animation using CSS. You shall get acquainted with CSS Animation but also get to understand some Vector Graphics through the course.

What You’ll Learn

This course includes information on using CSS transforms and transitions, working with animation-delay and animation-fill-mode, and timing and easing CSS animations. The course also covers animating elements in place, animating sprite images, chaining multiple animations, and animating SVG images. Additionally, it discusses strategies for creating high-performance CSS animations and how to optimize them to ensure smooth performance.

How You’ll Learn

Val introduces CSS transforms and transitions—the foundation of most CSS animations—and shows how to keyframe simple animations and adjust their timing, fill-mode, and direction. She also covers looping and chaining animations, animating HTML and SVG elements, optimizing animation performance, best uses for CSS animations right now, and the current level of support and performance and how we can expect that to change in the future. Val presents the lessons as a short series of building block animations—common things you might want to do with animations—then puts those techniques together in a small project of an animated infographic so you can see them all in action.

Fun Fact

• The course does not require an IDE, you can work along using Github Codespaces.

6. CSS – MASTERING ANIMATIONS (Driss Boumlik)

CSS – MASTERING ANIMATIONS by Driss Boumlik is one of the best paid courses available on Udemy with a 4.9 star rating.

What You’ll Learn

You will learn to animate colors, shadows, move and rotate things. You will also learn to create Menus and checkboxes, spinners and forms.

How You’ll Learn

The course provides hands-on learning with small projects.

7. Creative Advanced CSS Animations – Create 100 Projects! (Ahmed Sadek)

If you want to take another course after completing the previous one, Creative Advanced CSS Animations – Create 100 Projects would be my recommendation.

What You’ll Learn

The course provides step-by-step instructions on how to create more than 100 different examples of animations, transitions, and transforms using CSS. The goal of the course is to empower learners to be able to create any creative CSS animations they can think of. The course also covers the CSS clip-path property and how to use it in animating html elements. It covers different techniques of creating buttons, images, cards, loaders, menus, creative effects and so much more. This course will help learners understand how to create various types of animations, transitions and transforms and how to use them to make the website more interactive and engaging.

How You’ll Learn

The course provides videos with hands-on learning and practice.

8. SVG & CSS Animation – Using HTML & CSS (Codewithsam) 

Courses by CodewithSam are few of the courses covering CSS Animation using SVG. You will learn 3 SVG Animation projects in 2 hours. You will also learn to create SVGs in tools like Adobe Illustrator. All files are provided for students who don’t have the software or just want to code.

This course is an intermediate level course with CSS Animations and it’s perfect for both new and experienced web developers who are yet to use SVG within their projects. If you have used HTML and CSS before, you will have the knowledge to follow along with the examples.

What You’ll Learn

The course covers the fundamental techniques used in CSS to create animated SVG elements. SVG images look perfect on any screen size and with the importance of mobile web have become increasingly popular. SVG allows you to create animations and take flat illustrations to a whole new level. By the end of this short course you will have created three separate SVG animations from scratch.

The second course by Codewithsam covers various techniques for animating logos, social icons, text and other elements on a website. It provides step-by-step instructions creating a hand-drawn text effect using CSS. It also explains different CSS animation properties and how to use them. Additionally, it covers the use of gradients over text and icons, including how to make them work cross-browser. The course also discusses using masks and the CodePen tool to create animations, as well as an introduction to optimizing SVG images online.

How You’ll Learn

Lessons are taught with video screencasts, explained in detail as we work through real projects created directly for this course.

Fun Facts

• CodewithSam has two courses on SVGs and Animating SVGs. The second course can be found here. This is one of the best rated courses on Udemy.

9. 5 HTML, CSS & JS Mini Projects – Scroll Animation, Rotating Navigation, Drag Events, etc (Traversy Media)

This free course covers 5 of the 50 projects that Traversy Media teaches in its animation course on Udemy. The course is a purely project based course. I am placing the course towards the end of the list since a knowledge of javascript is required. The course teaches you to make animations using Vanilla JS. The full course on Udemy is about 18 hours long.

What You’ll Learn

The course covers 5 projects:

• Scroll Animation Project
• Rotating Navigation Project
• Login Input Wave
• Animated 3D Boxes Project
• Hoverboard Project

How You’ll Learn

You will learn how to manipulate the DOM using Javascript and create the animations by following along.

Additional info

• You can find the full course with all 50 projects on this paid Udemy course.

10. JavaScript Game: Interactive Questions With CSS Transitions & Animations (learnwebcode)

This is a part of Brad’s free coding bootcamp that can be found here. You will learn how to build a simple Math game in javascript with CSS Animations and Transitions

What You’ll Learn

You will learn to use javascript and create some basic CSS Transitions and Animations with this game.

How You’ll Learn

You will learn by following the course along with the video on YouTube.

You can find more of Brad’s premium courses here.

11. Bonus Material (Advanced Animations and Tools)

Once you have completed some of the basics of CSS Animations and can understand some of the tricks used in creating them, I would recommend you to look at some of the videos by Kevin Powell and WebDevSimplified. They have covered tons of things with CSS and are good resources to simply learn CSS. Here are two of the complex animations from them:

• 3D CSS – lighting, animations, and more! From Kevin Powell and
• Can I Create This VERY Complex CSS Animation? From WebDevSimplified

If you want to add some animations quickly, without having to create them from scratch, here are some useful websites:

• Angry Tools
• Keyframes.app
• Animate.css
• Keyframe Animation
• Animista
• EnjoyCSS

If you have more links that could help, please do not hesitate to mention them in the comments.

The post 10 Best CSS Animation Courses to Take in 2023 appeared first on The Report by Class Central.

The origins of massive open online courses (MOOCs) in China can be traced back to November 2011, when 20 courses from Chinese universities were made available online through the OpenCourseWare platform iCourse.

For years at Class Central, we’ve been interested in the development of online education in China. You can find our coverage on the subject here.

In this article, we discuss the emergence of MOOCs in China and compile a comprehensive list of Chinese-language online course platforms.

Origins

The first full-fledged MOOC platform in China, XuetangX, was launched in October 2013 by Tsinghua University. Many more similar platforms would promptly follow.

Like online course platforms worldwide, Chinese MOOC platforms saw a surge in both course numbers and enrollments in 2020 due to the pandemic.

In early 2022, the Chinese platforms listed in this article offered close to 70K online courses. That’s about twice as many as in 2020. Now, in early 2023, we reached a total of about 100K courses, showing that the growth trend perdures.

On March 28, 2022, China’s Ministry of Education announced the “Smart Education of China” initiative and launched the comprehensive website Chinaooc, bringing together all the MOOC platforms of mainland China.

Platforms

Here are the Chinese online course platforms that focus on MOOCs. You can click on one to jump to the description.

• XuetangX
• Chinese University MOOC
• Zhihuishu
• CNMOOC
• Xue Yin Online
• Chinese MOOCs
• UOOC Online
• Zhejiang Provincial MOOC Platform
• E-Huixue
• CQOOC
• Rong You Xue Tang
• Ulearning
• ICVE MOOC College
• ICC
• ErYa
• Gaoxiaobang
• PMPHMOOC
• UMOOCs
• iLab-X
• MOEC
• Educoder
• eWant
• ShareCourse
• OpenEdu

XuetangX

In October 2013, Tsinghua University along with partner institutions in China announced the launch of XuetangX, China’s first MOOC platform. The are close to 7000 courses and programs offered on the platform, including live streamings, online degrees, microcredentials, and cohort-based boot camps. XuetangX reached over 80 million users at its 8th anniversary on October 10, 2021.

The platform raised series B funding, moved away from Open edX and redesigned their website at the beginning of 2020. In April 2020, it went international and began to offer around 470 free English courses for global learners.

Here’s some of Class Central’s previous coverage on XuetangX:

• XuetangX Raises Series B Funding, Moves Away From Open edX Platform
• China’s Largest MOOC Platforms Go International, Launch Courses in English
• XuetangX: A Look at China’s First and Biggest MOOC Platform

Chinese University MOOC

Chinese University MOOC, also often called iCourse, is the fruit of a collaboration between the Chinese internet giant NetEase and the original iCourse learning platform. The MOOC platform offers over 10,000 free university courses, including nationally-recognized MOOCs. Free digital certificates are automatically available when students pass quizzes and final exam.

Zhihui Shu

Zhihui Shu, which translates to “Wisdom Tree”, was launched in December 2012. It has the particularity of allowing its university partners to share credit-bearing courses with one another, facilitating academic credit mobility across China.

Of the 14,100 courses offered on the platform, 10,500 (that is, 75%) are credit-granting courses only for on-campus students. The platform offers 45 courses with a free digital certificates. And there are also 18 microcredential programs available.

CNMOOC

In April 2014, Shanghai Jiao Tong University launched CNMOOC, a online course platform promoting the integration of MOOCs into China’s on-campus higher education system. The platform offers over 3000 courses. About half of them provide free digital certificates.

Xue Yin Online

Xue Yin Online launched in November 2017. It was developed by The Open University of China and the Chaoxing Group. The purpose of this online course platform is to serve as a “credit bank” for vocational skills, facilitating the transfer of credit and the recognition of prior learning across different universities. The platform offers nearly over 16,000 course with a free digital certificate.

Chinese MOOCs

Chinese MOOCs was founded in February 2015 by Peking University in collaboration with the Alibaba Group. About 150 free courses with a free digital certificate are offered on the platform, most of them provided by Peking University.

UOOC Online

The University Open Online Courses (UOOC) platform was founded by Shenzhen University in February 2016, subsuming the preexisting MOOC platform from April 2014. The are 1375 free courses on the platform, with the vast majority also offering credit for on-campus students.

Zhejiang Provincial MOOC Platform

The Zhejiang Institutions of Higher Learning Online Open Course Sharing Platform — or Zhejiang Provincial MOOC Platform for short — is backed by the Education Department of the province of Zhejiang, south of Shanghai. There are 17,500 courses offered on the platform.

E-Huixue

In December 2015, the Department of Education of the Aihui District, situated in the northwest of China, launched E-Huixue. Like Zhejiang’s Provincial MOOC Platform, the purpose of E-Huixue is to serve as a regional repository for online courses. The platform offers more than 2500 MOOCs with a free digital certificate.

CQOOC

Chongqing University Open Online Learning Platform (CQOOC), was established by the Ministry of Education in Chongqing (a municipality in southwest China) in June 2016. Around 4300 courses, mostly from universities and colleges in Chongqing, are offered on the platform.

Rong You Xue Tang

Rong You Xue Tang is the new name of the former Beijing MOOC Research Association platform. It was founded in 2016 by Renmin University of China together with several Beijing-based universities. Over 210 free courses are provided on the platform, some of which are credit-eligible courses.

Ulearning

Ulearning was launched by the online learning company Ulearning in May 2015. There are close to 2700 courses provided on the platform.

ICVE MOOC College

ICVE was built for professional education by Higher Education Press in 2014. There are over 7300 free courses offered on the platform, and over 80% of them provide a free certificate.

ICC

ICC was launched by Higher Education Press in 2016. More than 4000 courses from 210 universities are offered on the platform.

ErYa

ErYa was launched in January 2015 by the Chaoxing Group, an edtech corporation based in Beijing. The MOOC platform offers around 500 free courses in liberal arts from humanities to creative thinking.

Gaoxiaobang

Gaoxiaobang was established by a subsidiary of Huike Group, a company focused on the upskilling and reskilling of professionals in tech-related domains. The platform was launched in September 2015, and it currently offers close to 470 free courses.

PMPHMOOC

PMPHMOOC was established in 2015 by the medical publisher People’s Medical Publishing House in partnership with medical schools and academic institutions across China. It provides 70 health-related MOOCs in 10 subjects — for instance, in anatomy and biochemistry.

UMOOCs

UMOOCs is a Chinese MOOC platform for studying foreign languages. The platform was founded by Beijing Foreign Studies University in December 2017, and it is affiliated with the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, a publishing company dedicated to all facets of foreign language study in China. It offers over 400 free courses with certificate covering 10 languages.

iLab-X

iLab-X is a MOOC platform for virtual simulation experiments launched by Higher Education Press in 2017. Close to 3500 virtual experiments are provided on the platform.

MOEC

MOEC is a MOOC platform for virtual simulation experiment education in medicine, launched by the company Mengoo in 2020. The MOOC platform has provided around 720 courses in medicine for over 100 university medical schools in China.

Educoder

Educoder is a MOOC platform for computer science and programming that was launched in July 2016. There are over 640 free courses and thousands of free programming exercises. The MOOC platform also allows its verified users to create their own courses, exercises, and online classrooms.

eWant

eWant is a MOOC platform that was launched by National Chiao Tung University in 2013. National Chiao Tung University is one of Taiwan’s leading public research universities, located in Hsinchu, Taiwan. It hosts more than 3200 courses from over 90 different universities.

ShareCourse

ShareCourse was founded by Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University in September 2012. 90 institutions contributed over 650 courses to the MOOC platform. About 190 of them are free.

OpenEdu

OpenEdu is a MOOC platform from Taiwan. The MOOC platform is based on Open edX and offers over 470 courses in subjects including computer science, business management, humanities and art.

The post Massive List of Chinese Online Course Platforms in 2023 appeared first on The Report by Class Central.

Has the vastness of space ever made your head spin at the speed of light? Have you ever wondered what a Dyson sphere is? Maybe you have a few questions about what people born on Mars would look like. In this course all these questions will be answered and so will many more. Futurism and Space Exploration is a fun and self-paced way to learn the answers to questions the amateur stargazer and space lover may have. The best part is that it’s all in bite-sized videos that are easy to binge.

Who should take this course?

Anyone with a love for space and a few out of the box questions about the more odd and interesting parts of space. If you are a beginner in star gazing and a person who yearns for straightforward easy to understand answers to unexpected questions, this course is for you. I would suggest it to students who would like a space themed hobby or those looking for a pastime that remains interesting even after the course as the answer given can be expanded on and discussed even further on other forums.

The instructors

The course is presented by PBS Space Time through YouTube and hosted by the quick paced smooth-talking physicist Dr. Gabe Perez-Giz and mellow-minded super-intellectual astrophysicist Dr. Matt O’Dowd. The two writers of the series gave easy to understand and logical answers in such as to simulate a casual discussion which helped in understanding the concepts presented in the series.

What will you learn?

We’ll not spoil all the surprises, but here’s a rough overview of what is covered in the course:

•         Exoplanets and where they are found.
•         Dyson spheres- what are they and how would we make one?
•         Terraforming planets and what we need to survive on another planet.
•         What secret NASA projects have been used in our daily lives.
•         How do wormholes work?
•         Can we reach hyper speed or travel at the speed of light?
•         The potential asteroid mining revolution.

To give you more information would ruin the fun of taking the course. The only way to find out all the questions and their respective answers is to watch the entire series.

Requirements

No degrees or formal education on the topics discussed is required. I would suggest a prior exposure to a few very basic principles of space is needed to fully grasp the gravity of the concepts discussed. The course is only about 4-hours long and is completely self-paced which allows you to take as much time as you need. I suggest a video a day which is about 10-15 minutes. This gives you about 20 days of interesting concepts and topics to ponder over.

Personal experience

I personally enjoyed the entire series. The short video format kept me engaged long enough to truly have a good understanding of the lesson and remained short enough to not bore me. The course is made for people with short attention spans and short bursts of time throughout their day. I felt like I learnt quite a lot without being bombarded with information or being left confused at the end of a lesson. The topics to this day remain relevant and interesting. The various lessons inspired me to look deeper into space and futurism.

In conclusion, the course is well scripted and written in such a way to keep the viewer engaged. The topics remained relevant and the short form is very digestible for those with odd working hours or short periods of free time. The hosts and writers are very knowledgeable and truly have a good way of explaining complex terminology. A brilliant course that anyone with a love for space should watch.

A course that is similar in style and topic is The Universe and Space stuff by Kurzgesagt- In a Nutshell.

The post Futurism and Space Exploration: a Perfect Start to the Wilder Side of Space Research appeared first on The Report by Class Central.

A Silent Voice is one of my favorite animes. Reason – its female lead, Nishimiya Shoko, is deaf, and the creators do an excellent job portraying her struggles, and most importantly, the use of sign language. I had never thought about sign language seriously before watching this anime, and it sparked my interest to learn more.

In this guide, I’ve selected the 10 best free and paid American Sign Language (ASL) online courses for you from the 50+ Sign Language courses on our catalog by following a well-defined methodology that you can find below.

But if you want to jump straight to the results, here are my top 10 picks. You can click on a course to jump to the corresponding section:

What is American Sign Language (ASL)?

American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language and is the primary language of the deaf community in the United States of America and in many parts of Canada. It is a visual language expressed by hand movements, facial expressions and body posture.

Sign language is not universal – different sign languages are used in different countries and regions. Some countries also adopt features of ASL in their sign languages. Like any spoken language, ASL has its own grammar and syntax that differs from English – its own rules for pronunciation, word formation and word order.

Why are American Sign Language (ASL) Skills Important?

In the USA, there are about 48 million people with hearing impairment, from which an estimate of 500,000 can sign language. Considering that service providers, educators, friends and relatives will also have some level of expertise, this number can be even higher.

Learning any language is not just about memorizing hundreds or thousands of words – you can also participate in a new community of people and better understand the Deaf Culture. Anyone can benefit from being able to communicate with the deaf and hard of hearing, parents, educators, first responders, and service providers, just to name a few.

And if you want to make a career out of it, there are thousands of jobs for Sign Language Interpreters on Indeed, LinkedIn, and Glassdoor with an average salary of $29 per hour.

What is My Experience with American Sign Language (ASL)?

I am a Guided Project Instructor and a Beta Tester at Coursera, having tested many courses before they’re officially launched. I have taken over 50 online courses in various subjects.

My experience as an online learner and teacher has given me some perspective on what to look for in an online course. I used my experience to evaluate each course in this list.

Course Ranking Methodology

I built this ranking following the now tried-and-tested methodology I used in previous rankings (you can find them all here). It involves a three-step process:

1. Research: I started by leveraging Class Central’s database with 100K online courses and 200K+ reviews. Then, I made a preliminary selection of 50+ Sign Language courses by rating, reviews, and bookmarks.
2. Evaluate: I read through reviews on Class Central, Reddit, and course providers to understand what other learners thought about each course and combined it with my own experience as a learner.
3. Select: Well-made courses were picked if they presented valuable and engaging content and they have to fit in a set of criteria and be ranked accordingly: comprehensive curriculum, release date, affordability, ratings and enrollments.

The end result is a unique selection of courses that combines a decade of Class Central data and my own experience as an online learner to try to get the best of both worlds. So far, I’ve spent more than 10 hours building this list, and I’ll continue to update it.

Course Ranking Statistics

Here are some statistics regarding this course ranking:

• Combined, these courses have accrued over 31.8K enrollments.
• 7 courses are free or free-to-audit and 3 courses are paid.
• The most-represented course provider in the ranking is YouTube, with 6 courses.
• All 10 courses are in English.
• The Sign Language subject is followed by over 4.2K learners on Class Central, and accounts for over 50 courses in Class Central catalog.

So without further ado, let’s get to my picks for the best American Sign Language (ASL) online courses.

1. ASL University: Lessons (ASL University)

My first pick for the best American Sign Language (ASL) online course is the free course ASL University: Lessons, offered by ASL University.

In this comprehensive course with hundreds of hours of engaging video lectures, interactive quizzes, and plenty of learning resources you’ll learn from scratch how to be a great communicator in sign language with the specialist Dr. William Vicars.

Vicars will build your confidence from the ground up, starting from spelling and simple daily sentences to more and more abstract concepts. He uses evidence based language learning with reinforcement, repetition, and a curriculum that covers the most frequent vocabulary from lesson one. 

Every lesson is given with an accompanying learner that will give you the opportunity to feel like you’re in a private class with the instructor and surely you won’t get bored while learning.

What You’ll Learn

In this course, you’ll cover 46 themed-based lessons:

In the first 30 lessons, you’ll learn the basics you need to communicate in ASL about yourself, your family, feelings, basic actions, food, clothes, animals, school and work, and traveling.

From lesson 31 to 45, you’ll learn more intermediate skills and start learning about more nuances in sign language to talk about more abstract concepts such as emotions and dreams. You’ll learn about sports, giving your opinion, gossip, hand tools, giving directions, holidays, and talking about your health.

Finally, you’ll learn more upper-intermediate and advanced concepts in the last 15 lessons: talking about numbers and money, travel, buying things/grocery, reading preferences, dating and relationships, academic, medicine and hospital talk, cars and driving, playing games, goodbyes, and social media.

How You’ll Learn

The course is broken down into 4 modules and 46 lessons. Each module involves about 23 hours of work. Concepts are taught through a combination of videos, readings and quizzes.

Fun Facts

• Vicars has a doctorate in Deaf Studies & Deaf Education from Lamar University and a masters in Deaf Education.
• He used to be a Professor of American Sign Language and Deaf Studies at California State University, Sacramento, and nowadays, he’s the president and owner of the Lifeprint Institute, a consultation business focusing on technology-enhanced delivery of ASL Instruction.
• He was born hard of hearing and has become progressively deafer.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

2. Beginner American Sign Language (ASL ) Course (Laura Berg Life)

My second pick for the best American Sign Language (ASL) online course is the free course Beginner American Sign Language (ASL ) Course, offered by Laura Berg Life on YouTube.

This free course has a good balance of lessons and practice. It starts with basic vocabulary and simple sentences, and gradually moves up to more complex sentences as you learn more ASL signs. At the end of each lesson, there’s a video dedicated to quizzes to test your receptive skills. By the end of the course, you should be able to sign basic ASL words and form simple sentences.

What You’ll Learn

In this course, you’ll cover ten-themed based lessons:

1. Introduction
2. Family
3. Describing people
4. Food
5. Home
6. Location and directions
7. Activities
8. School
9. Meetings and scheduling
10. Hobbies and interests

How You’ll Learn

The course is broken down into 31 videos. Each video involves about 10 minutes of work. Concepts are taught through a combination of video lectures and video quizzes.

Fun Facts

• Gendron was born deaf and has been an ASL teacher for more than 25 years.
• His wife is also deaf and his kids are CODA (Child of Deaf Adult) which means their first language is ASL!
• Berg is the president and founder of My Smart Hands.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

3. ASL Basics (Learn How to Sign)

My third pick for the best American Sign Language (ASL) online course is the free course ASL Basics, offered by Learn How to Sign on YouTube.

Aimed towards beginners, this free ASL course is more of a collection or series of tutorials that teach you how to sign basic ASL words and phrases. The lessons will be helpful in your daily ASL conversations, starting with the alphabet and getting into simple words, common phrases,  greetings, feelings, situation-based signs, ASL sentence structure, and many more.

What You’ll Learn

In this course, you’ll understand the alphabet (ABCs), common and descriptive signs, numbers, questions, animal signs, greetings, farewells and introductions, days of the week and months of the year, affirmation and negation signs, and places around the town.

You’ll also learn about describing people, feelings and emotions, barista signs, meat and dairy signs, fruit and veggie signs, food signs, common phrases, summer signs, school signs, money, routines, sentence structure, and profession signs.

How You’ll Learn

The course is broken down into 48 videos. Each video involves about 5 to 10 minutes of work. Concepts are taught through video lectures only.

Fun Facts

• Meredith is a state certified ASL teacher and certified educational interpreter.
• She also holds a M.Ed. in Deaf Education.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

4. Learn & Master Sign Language (Udemy)

My fourth pick for the best American Sign Language (ASL) online course is Learn & Master Sign Language on Udemy.

One of the most comprehensive courses on this list, this course for beginners will help you master the receptive and the expressive components of ASL. The lessons are interactive, giving you a solid foundation in basic and advanced signing including vocabulary, sentences, narratives and dialogues. The course also contains enough practice opportunities as well.

What You’ll Learn

You’ll start with the basics which includes introductions, gesturing, the alphabet members of the family, and more. Then, you’ll progress to advanced techniques such as expansion features, classifiers, storytelling, and more. Other topics include how to communicate during emergencies, everyday activities, facts about the dynamic deaf culture, interacting at sporting events, and more.

How You’ll Learn

The course is broken down into 28 sections. Each section involves about 1.5 to 2 hours of work. Concepts are taught through a combination of videos, a lesson book and in-video practice quizzes.

Fun Facts

• Webb is a professional ASL interpreter and educator.
• This course used to be offered in DVD format, but now you can access it online from anywhere!
• Bridges is a deaf ASL educator, interpreter (CDI), workshop presenter, grandpa, father, and friend.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

5. American Sign Language Level 1 (Udemy)

My fifth pick for the best American Sign Language (ASL) online course is the American Sign Language Level 1 on Udemy.

This short course for beginners is a great way to get started with and learn the foundations of ASL. It will teach you easy and useful ASL topics such as the origins of ASL language, the alphabet and finger-spelling, family signs, feelings, verbs, key nouns, and much more. At the end of this course, you’ll also get to demonstrate a short story in ASL.

What You’ll Learn

In this course, you’ll cover the following:

1. Finger spelling
2. The ASL alphabet
3. Number signs
4. Colors
5. Animals
6. Food and drink
7. Family signs
8. Key verbs and nouns
9. Feelings and emotions
10. Sentences

How You’ll Learn

The course is broken down into 10 sections. Each section involves about 10 to 30 minutes of work. Concepts are taught through a combination of videos and downloadable resources.

Fun Facts

• Manny Martin started learning ASL to communicate with his Deaf foster son in 1984. In 1992, he became an ASL interpreter and in 1994 an educator for kids and adults. 

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

6. ASL | Pronouns + Vocab + Practice | American Sign Language (Skillshare)

My sixth pick for the best American Sign Language (ASL) online course is ASL | Pronouns + Vocab + Practice | American Sign Language on Skillshare.

This course focuses specifically on the use of two types of pronouns – personal and possessive  – in ASL. You’ll learn to sign and recognize pronouns in ASL, increase your vocabulary and combine them to create useful phrases and sentences. And you’ll be able to achieve all this within a matter of a couple of hours.

What You’ll Learn

In this course, you’ll learn about handshapes, I/me vs. my/mine, you vs. your, he/she/it vs. his/her/its, pronouns 1st group, we/us vs. our, they/them vs. their, you (plural) vs. your (plural), pronouns 2nd group, and all pronouns.

You’ll also explore signs for apple, house, mom, cat, purse and shoes, noun vocabulary signs, pronoun + noun phrases, pronoun + noun (silent), signs for happy, sad, mad, scared, surprised and hungry, pronoun + adjective, and simple sentences (silent).

How You’ll Learn

The course is broken down into 40 lessons. Each lesson involves about 2 to 8 minutes of work. Concepts are taught through a combination of videos and a final assignment.

Fun Facts

• When Michael was 3 years old, his brother got sick and lost his hearing, so Michael and his family decided to learn ASL and they all became fluent!

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

7. Learning Sign Language (Jack Hartmann Kids Music Channel)

My seventh pick for the best American Sign Language (ASL) online course is the free course Learning Sign Language, offered by Jack Hartmann Kids Music Channel on <provider>.

Whether you are a kid or an adult, songs will most surely not fail to hold a spot in your mind. Don’t be fooled by the course name; songs are a great way to learn sign language even for both kids and grown ups. This free course is well-suited for your kids or even yourself for learning ASL as well as Australian Sign Language and British Sign Language.

What You’ll Learn

This list includes the following songs you can follow (sign) along with Jack Hartmann and friends:

1. See It, Say It, Sign It (American Sign Language Alphabet Song)
2. We Are A Family
3. Greetings Song in Spanish with no subtitles
4. One Small Voice
5. Rap it, Read It, Say It, Sign It
6. We Are a Family
7. Auslan See it Say it Sign it (Australian Sign Language)
8. See it Say it Sign it (British Sign Language)
9. Animal signs (domestic and farm animals)
10. Sign the colors

How You’ll Learn

The course is broken down into 20 videos. Each video involves about 2 to 5 minutes of work. Concepts are taught through video lectures only.

Fun Facts

• Hartmann has made over 55 albums with over 1,500 super fun movement songs for children.
• He is a 2016 Parents’ Choice Approved Award Winner for the CD, Brain Breaks.
• His music is research-based and teacher-approved to focus on helping children learn.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

8. Learn ASL in 31 Days (ASL Rochelle)

My eighth pick for the best American Sign Language (ASL) online course is the free course Learn ASL in 31 Days, offered by ASL Rochelle on <provider>.

As its name suggests, this free course will teach you ASL in 31 days, or more specifically, one topic each day. Within a matter of a couple of hours, you’ll be familiar with the alphabet, different words, numbers, fingerspelling, sentence structure, and much more.

What You’ll Learn

In this course, you’ll learn about the alphabet, questions, time, places, family, indexing, colors numbers 1 to 100, time, money, fingerspelling, emotions, food, animals, health, countries, states, agent signs, sentence structure, classifiers, idioms, and negatives.

How You’ll Learn

The course is broken down into 32 videos. Each video involves about 5 to 10 minutes of work. Concepts are taught through a combination of video lectures and video tests.

Fun Facts

• Rochelle has nearly 200K subscribers on her YouTube channel where she posts ASL content and tutorials.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

9. ASL Basics – All Lessons (Chris Gorges)

My ninth pick for the best American Sign Language (ASL) online course is the free course ASL Basics – All Lessons, offered by Chris Gorges on YouTube.

This fairly comprehensive free course is a collection of ASL tutorials on various topics such as the ASL alphabet, basic signs, words, phrases, colors, numbers, fingerspelling and more. You’ll also get a lot of practice through the practice lessons dedicated to certain sections, and tips to become fast and fluent.

What You’ll Learn

In this course, you’ll learn about high frequency words, basic signs and phrases to start a conversation, food and drinks, time, colors, days of the week, months of the year, numbers, animals, family signs (mom, dad, brother, sister), technology, outdoors, and words for winter.

You’ll also understand feelings and emotions, words for the beach while in oceanside, the alphabet, colors, pro-tactile ASL, best ASL dictionaries, interpreting stories in ASL, what a Rubiks cube can teach us about language learning, and office vocabulary.

How You’ll Learn

The course is broken down into 111 videos. Most videos involve about 1 to 5 minutes of work. Concepts are taught through video lectures only.

Fun Facts

• Chris Gorges is a certified sign language interpreter and educator in California.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

10. Starter Signs – Baby Sign Language (TalkBoxMom)

My tenth pick for the best American Sign Language (ASL) online course is the free course Starter Signs – Baby Sign Language, offered by TalkBoxMom on YouTube.

Babies pick up sign language fast. So it’s best to start teaching early. This short free course is specially made for babies (well actually their parents of course!) so that they can teach their babies simple words and phrases in ASL.

What You’ll Learn

In this course, you’ll learn different words and phrases in baby sign language such as finished, again, pretty, blanket, binky, banana, stop, beautiful, book, all done, change diaper, clean up, cold, cook, cup, cracker, come, want, like, doll, dance, dad, dirty, close, french fries, fall off, down, drink, eat, fall down, and fan.

You’ll also learn words and phrases such as stairs, go out, milk, more, music, runny nose, touch, and mix, medicine, gentle, give, go, grandpa, granddad or grandfather, hurt, juice, jump, kiss, laugh, library, brush teeth, grandma or grandmother, blocks, bubbles, bye, I love you, inside, look, love, dress (get dressed), car, and thank you.

More words and phrases include happy, hear, hug, listen, tissue, take turns, swing, sweep, stroller, stick, shoes, sick, sing, slow, and smile, snack, sorry, spill, spit, toilet, potty, poop, play, rice, coat, rattle, read, tree, you’re welcome, up, pray, spit up, ball, bath, toy, wait, wash hands, wet, heart, sleep, share, and hot.

How You’ll Learn

The course is broken down into 104 videos. Each video involves about 1 minute of work. Concepts are taught through video lectures only.

Fun Facts

• Olguin founded TalkBox.Mom to help families start talking in a foreign language (and ASL) the same day they start and reach their goals of becoming at least conversational.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

The post 10 Best American Sign Language (ASL) Courses to Take in 2023 appeared first on The Report by Class Central.

As avid online learners, my Class Central colleagues and I have completed hundreds of online courses over the years, including many with free certificates, as you can see in the collage below.

In 2023, free certificates have become rarer. But if you know where to look, there is still an abundance of free certificates available online for learning software development.

In this article, we bring together all the free certificates and badges that are scattered across the web. In total, the platforms below offer over 1000 free certificate courses for learning software development.

I started Class Central back in 2011, when universities such as Stanford began to offer some of their courses online for free. Since then, the Class Central database has grown to over 100K online courses.

Having written about online education for over a decade, I remember when platforms like Coursera and edX offered free certificates. Then, rather abruptly, free certificates seemed to pretty much disappear.

This inspired us to write a Massive List of Free Certificates and Badges. To our surprise, we discovered there were still thousands of free certificates available online. To date, that article has received 2M views.

In the same vein, this article aims to draw attention to the organizations that continue to support open education in software development by offering free certificate courses. These include:

• Learning platforms — e.g. LinkedIn Learning, freeCodeCamp, and FutureLearn.
• Leading universities — e.g. Harvard, the University of Helsinki, and HPI.
• Big tech companies — e.g. Google, Microsoft, and IBM.

More Free Certificates

If you don’t find what you need here, browse Class Central’s catalog of 100K courses or visit our thematic collections:

• Class Central’s Best Online Courses of All Time
• 1600+ Coursera Courses That Are Still Completely Free
• 1000+ Free Digital Marketing Certificates
• 800+ Open University Free Certificates
• 100+ FutureLearn Courses That Still Offer Free Certificates

You can find all our free certificates articles here.

Without further ado, here are the platforms where you can find 1000+ free developer certifications.

700+ Free Google Certifications

Google has launched several initiatives to teach people skills such as coding, digital marketing, and data analytics. You can find a complete list in our dedicated article.

Below is a selection of Google’s offerings:

• Google Analytics for Beginners ★★★★★(38)
• Get started with Google Maps Platform – web ★★★★★(4)
• Google Ads Search Certification ★★★★★(2)
• Google Analytics for Power Users ★★★★★(1)
• Google Cloud Essentials ★★★★★(1)
• Application Development – Python ★★★★★(1)
• YouTube Music Certification ★★★★★(1)
• Shopping ads Certification ★★★★★(1)
• Creating with Google Maps ★★★★☆(1)
• Intro to ML: Language Processing ★★★★☆(1)

freeCodeCamp’s Free Certifications

freeCodeCamp platform offers thousands of hours of learning content, broken down into certifications on subjects such as web development and data science.

Here are the certifications currently offered:

• Responsive Web Design ★★★★★(77)
• JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures ★★★★★(31)
• Front End Development Libraries ★★★★★(4)
• Data Analysis with Python ★★★★★(4)
• Quality Assurance ★★★★★(4)
• Machine Learning with Python ★★★★★(4)
• Scientific Computing with Python ★★★★★(1)
• Data Visualization ★★★★★(1)
• Back End Development and APIs ★★★★★(1)
• Relational Database (Beta) ★★★★★(1)
• Information Security ★★★★☆(6)

Harvard Free Certificate Courses

Harvard offers a series of academic online courses exploring various facets of computer science, including programming fundamentals and AI. You can find all the details in our dedicated article.

Here are Harvard’s current free certificate offerings:

• Introduction to Computer Science ★★★★★(140)
• Computer Science for Business Professionals ★★★★★(14)
• Introduction to Artificial Intelligence with Python ★★★★★(11)
• Web Programming with Python and JavaScript ★★★★★(22)
• Computer Science for Lawyers ★★★★★(5)
• Understanding Technology ★★★★★(10)
• Introduction to Programming with Python ★★★★★(2)
• Introduction to Programming with Scratch ★★★★★(2)
• Introduction to Game Development ★★★★☆(3)

1000+ of Free Microsoft Badges

Microsoft offers thousands of modules and hundreds of learning paths to explore the company’s products, including Office 365, Visual Studio, and Azure. Once you finish a course, you’ll get a badge on your learner profile.

Here are some of the courses offered by Microsoft:

• Create and use analytics reports with Power BI ★★★★★(2)
• AZ-104: Configure and manage virtual networks for Azure administrators ★★★★★(2)
• Implement a Windows Server hybrid cloud infrastructure ★★★★★(1)
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fundamentals (CRM): Explore Dynamics 365 Marketing ★★★★★(1)
• Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals: Explore visual tools for machine learning ★★★★☆(1)
• Getting Started with Microsoft PowerShell
• Classify space rocks by using Python and artificial intelligence
• Microsoft Azure Fundamentals: Describe cloud concepts
• Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals: Get started with AI

1000+ of Hours of LinkedIn Learning Courses with Free Certification

LinkedIn Learning, the online learning platform integrated with the LinkedIn professional social network, offers hundreds of online courses and learning paths that include a free certificate. Here too, we have a dedicated article with a full list.

Here’s a selection of LinkedIn Learning free certificate courses:

• Communication Foundations
• Prepare for the CompTIA A+ Certification (220-1001 and 220-1002)
• Entrepreneurship Foundations
• Prepare for the CompTIA Network+ (N10-007) Certification
• Agile Requirements Foundations
• Finding a Job during Challenging Economic Times
• Administrative Professional Tips
• Professional Soft Skills Learning Pathway
• Video Interview Tips
• Recovering from a Layoff

University of Helsinki Free Certificates

The University of Helsinki offers academic online courses through its independent course platform, MOOC.fi, including the following courses which include a free certificate of completion:

• Elements of AI ★★★★★(715)
• Full Stack open 2022 ★★★★★(5)
• Java Programming ★★★★★(2)
• Cyber Security Base 2022 ★★★★★(2)
• Building AI ★★★★☆(13)
• DevOps with Kubernetes
• Ethics of AI
• DevOps with Docker
• Python Programming MOOC 2022
• Functional programming with Clojure

1000+ of Free Salesforce Badges

Salesforce, the cloud-based software provider, offers online courses through its Trailhead platform. You can learn skills related to Salesforce products. But you can also find courses on broader topics, such as blockchain or IOS development.

There are 1300+ modules and 100+ hands-on projects accessible free of charge on the platform. After finishing a module, you will get a free badge for your profile.

• Developer Beginner
• Developer Intermediate
• Developer Advanced
• Build Lightning Web Components
• AWS Cloud for Technical Professionals
• Develop with Mobile SDK
• Manage the Salesforce Way
• Get Started with iOS App Development
• Discover Trailhead Sample Apps
• Build Your Career in the Salesforce Ecosystem

MongoDB Free Certificates

MongoDB, the popular NoSQL database, offers free certificate courses through its learning platform, MongoDB University. Through these, you’ll learn database fundamentals of databases, and how to interact with them using various programming languages.

Here are some of the certificate courses MongoDB offers:

• MongoDB for Java Developers ★★★★★(18)
• MongoDB for Javascript Developers ★★★★★(1)
• MongoDB Basics ★★★★★(2)
• MongoDB for .NET Developers ★★★★☆(3)
• Basic Cluster Administration
• MongoDB for Python Developers
• MongoDB Performance
• Diagnostics and Debugging
• MongoDB for SQL Pros
• Data Modeling

Redis Free Certificates

Redis is a flexible data storage solution, akin to a lightweight database, that is used a lot in web development. Redis has a dedicated online learning platform, Redis University, where they offer free certificate courses to learn how to use Redis. These include:

• Redis for JavaScript Developers ★★★★★(1)
• Introduction to Redis Data Structures ★★★★★(1)
• Querying, Indexing, and Full-Text Search ★★★★☆(1)
• RediSearch
• Redis for Java Developers
• Redis for Python Developers
• Redis Streams
• Redis Security
• Running Redis at Scale

Cisco Free Certifications

Cisco, the IT and networking giant, offers a series of self-paced online courses through its Networking Academy platform that include a free certificate of completion. Here’s the list:

• Introduction to Cybersecurity ★★★★★(2)
• CPA: Programming Essentials in C++ ★★★★★(1)
• Cisco Packet Tracer ★★★★★(1)
• Cybersecurity Essentials ★★★★☆(3)
• Networking Essentials
• Introduction to IoT
• NDG Linux Essentials
• PCAP: Programming Essentials in Python
• Entrepreneurship
• JavaScript Essentials 1 (JSE)

90+ IBM Free Certificates

IBM’s platform CognitiveClass.ai offers 90 courses and 10 learning paths in data science, AI, big data, cloud computing, and blockchain.

The platform also provides a virtual lab environment allowing users to practice what they’ve learned in the courses. To earn a badge or certificate of completion, you need to score at least 70% in a course.

Here’s a selection of their free certificate courses:

• Deep Learning with TensorFlow
• Build Swift Mobile Apps with Watson AI Services
• Accelerating Deep Learning with GPUs
• Data Visualization with R
• Introduction to Open Source
• Using R with Databases
• Machine Learning – Dimensionality Reduction
• Predictive Modeling Fundamentals
• Text Analytics 101
• Mathematical Optimization for Business Problems

Kaggle Free Certificates

Kaggle is an online community for data scientists and aspiring data scientists alike. It offers over 50K public datasets, allowing you to build your own data science projects through Jupyter notebooks, and participate in competitions.

In addition, the platform offers a series of courses to learn the fundamentals of data science. Each leads to a certificate of completion.

• Python ★★★★★(3)
• Intro to SQL ★★★★☆(1)
• Computer Vision ★★★★☆(1)
• Intro to Machine Learning
• Pandas
• Data Visualization
• Intro to Deep Learning
• Data Cleaning
• Intro to AI Ethics
• Machine Learning Explainability

HackerRank Free Certificates

HackerRank, a platform for learning algorithms and data structures and preparing for coding interviews, provides skills certifications tests in topics such as problem solving, Python, and JavaScript.

Here are some of the tests you may complete to earn a certificate:

• Problem Solving (Basic)
• Python (Basic) Skills Certification
• Java (Basic) Skills Certification
• C# (Basic) Skills Certification
• JavaScript (Basic) Skills Certification
• SQL (Basic) Skills Certification
• Go (Basic) Skills Certification
• R (Basic) Skills Certification
• Node (Basic) Skills Certification

30+ DataCamp Free Certificates

DataCamp is a popular online platform for — you guessed it — learning about data science, but also general programming. The platform offers a series of courses that culminate in a statement of accomplishment. Here’s a selection:

• Beginning Bayes in R
• Basic Statistics
• Kaggle Python Tutorial on Machine Learning
• SQL Tutorial for Marketers
• Introduction to Python & Machine Learning
• Inferential Statistics
• Plotly Tutorial: Plotly and R
• Tidy Data in Python Mini-Course
• Introducción a Python (in Spanish)
• Introducción a R

100+ of Great Learning Free Certificates

Great Learning offers over a hundred free certificate courses in a wide variety of subjects, such as AI, data science, programming, cloud computing, and digital marketing. Here’s a selection:

• Microsoft Azure Essentials
• Data Analytics using Excel
• Introduction to Machine Learning
• Introduction to Cyber Security
• Cloud Computing Foundations
• Introduction to Deep Learning
• Introduction to NoSQL
• Introduction to Design Thinking
• Python Foundations
• Python Fundamentals for Beginners

60+ upGrad Free Certificates

upGrad is an online learning platform that offers over 60 free programs on subjects such as data science, business analytics, and technology.

Once you complete all the modules of a program, you’ll receive a certificate of completion.

Here are some of the free programs offered on upGrad:

• Programming with Python: Introduction for Beginners
• Introduction to Natural Language Processing
• Introduction to Data Analysis using Excel
• Introduction to Database Design with MySQL
• Data Science in E-commerce
• Introduction to Cryptocurrency
• React.js For Beginners
• Node.js For Beginners
• Core Java Basics
• Introduction to Blockchain Technology

100+ FutureLearn Free Certificates

FutureLearn, the European counterpart to Coursera and edX, offers hundreds of courses that include a “digital upgrade” — which, among others, entails a free certificate of completion. Again, you can find more details in our dedicated article.

Here’s a list of some of FutureLearn’s free offerings:

• Digital Skills: Digital Skills for Work and Life ★★★★★(2)
• Digital Skills: Digital Marketing ★★★★☆(7)
• Digital Skills: Web Analytics ★★★★★(1)
• Digital Skills: Social Media ★★★★☆(6)
• Digital Skills: Artificial Intelligence ★★★★☆(2)
• Digital Skills: User Experience ★★★★☆(1)
• Introduction to Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality
• Digital Skills: Reimagine Your Career
• Transforming Assessment and Recognition of Complex Learning Competencies
• Digital Skills: Mobile

Jovian Free Certificates

Jovian is an online data science bootcamp that offers a handful of free certificate courses. Here’s the list:

• Deep Learning with PyTorch: Zero to GANs
• Data Analysis with Python: Zero to Pandas
• Machine Learning with Python: Zero to GBMs
• Data Structures and Algorithms in Python
• Natural Language Processing: Zero to NLP

GitLab Free Certificates

GitLab, the popular version control website for hosting your repos, also offers free online courses to grow your professional skills.

Here are the free certifications on the platform:

• GitLab 101 Tool Certification
• GitLab 201 Tool Certification
• GitLab All-Remote Certification
• GitLab Manager Challenge

The post 1000+ Free Developer and IT Certifications appeared first on The Report by Class Central.

Are you tired of wasting time and energy manually deploying and managing your applications across various servers and environments? Do you wish there was an easier and more efficient way to handle these tasks? If so, then Kubernetes might be the solution for you, just as it was the solution for 61% of organizations.

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that simplifies the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

Whether you’re running traditional monolithic applications or microservices, Kubernetes can help you automate the deployment and management process across any infrastructure, whether it be on-premises, or cloud, or both (hybrid).

Read on more to find my top picks for the best Kubernetes course. Click on one to skip to the course details:

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes (also known as “K8s”) is an open-source container orchestration platform that was first developed by Google in 2014. Google had always used Docker containers to help squeeze every ounce of performance out of their servers to power intensive online services like Google Search and YouTube. To manage their rapidly growing number of clusters, Google built Borg (the predecessor of Kubernetes) to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

Borg did this by providing a set of APIs and tools to help the developer define the desired state of your applications. Once that’s done, Borg will handle the rest automatically. This means developers can focus on building and improving your applications, rather than worrying about the technicalities of deployment and management, while operations teams can easily ensure the reliability and performance of their applications.

Realizing the potential for this technology to become the industry-standard for managing containerized applications (and to indirectly monetize from it with their cloud services), Google released Kubernetes as a free and open-source project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to help speed up adoption and development. And it worked! Kubernetes is now the de-facto standard for container orchestration, with 61% of organizations in 2022 using Kubernetes to streamline the management of their containerized applications.

Over the years, Kubernetes has continued to evolve and expand, with new features and capabilities being added to meet the needs of a growing user base. Although Google Kubernetes Engine makes up a significant portion of container tools, there are other alternatives that extend upon Kubernetes like Amazon ECS, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Red Hat OpenShift.

According to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2022, Kubernetes is the second most loved and highly sought-after tool among developers and DevOps engineers. Additionally, the 10th Annual Open Source Jobs Report confirms that there is high demand for cloud and container technology as agreed by approximately 70% of hiring managers and IT experts. The salary reflects the demand, with Kubernetes engineers making an average of $150,000 a year according to ZipRecruiter, which is well above what the average software engineer makes. Learning Kubernetes is essential for any DevOps engineer, so learn Kubernetes if you plan to become one!

Best Courses Guides Methodology

I built this ranking following the now tried-and-tested methodology used in previous Best Courses Guides (you can find them all here). It involves a three-step process:

1. Research: I started by leveraging Class Central’s database with 100K online courses and 200K+ reviews. Then, I made a preliminary selection of 300+ Kubernetes courses by rating, reviews, and bookmarks.
2. Evaluate: I read through reviews on Class Central, Reddit, and course providers to understand what other learners thought about each course and combined it with my own experience as a learner.
3. Select: Well-made courses were picked if they presented valuable and engaging content and they have to fit in a set of criteria and be ranked accordingly: comprehensive curriculum, affordability, release date, ratings and enrollments.

Course Ranking Statistics

Here are some aggregate stats about the ranking:

• Over 1.3K people are following 300+ Kubernetes Courses on Class Central.
• All of the courses in this ranking except for the third require knowledge of containers (like Docker).
• 7 of the courses in this ranking are free, free-to-audit, or have free-trial, whereas the rest are paid.
• All of the courses are in English.
• Six of the courses are suitable for beginners, while two are for intermediates and another two more are for experienced developers.

Without further ado, let’s go through the top picks.

1. Kubernetes Tutorial for Beginners (TechWorld with Nana)

My #1 pick for the best Kubernetes course is TechWorld with Nana’s Kubernetes Tutorial for Beginners.

This free course is my top pick because it effectively balances theoretical and practical info in just 4 hours. Through the use of clear visuals and hands-on examples, Nana distills hard-to-understand concepts into the simplest of forms.

By the end of this course, you’ll have a thorough understanding of Kubernete components and architecture, and be able to use it to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

In order to take this course, you’ll need to know what containers are. If you don’t, but want a course that teaches both Dockers and Kubernetes, take a look at the third pick in this ranking.

What You’ll Learn

You’ll begin this course by learning about the main parts of Kubernetes, like Nodes, Pods, and services, and how they fit into the overall architecture of the system.

After studying its parts, it’s time to start using it! You’ll set up and use Kubernetes on your local machine with minikube and kubectl, and perform common tasks such as managing pods and deployments, and debugging issues.

Eventually, you’ll find yourself needing to organize multiple Kubernetes objects. Do not fret, namespaces and YAML configuration files are here to help! You’ll learn the difference between them —  where namespaces are used to organize and manage groups of Kubernetes objects, YAML is used to define and create those objects. You’ll also learn how to use ingresses to expose one or multiple services to the external world, as well as Helm, a package manager, for deploying applications to the web.

Finally, you’ll dive deeper into three specific components of Kubernetes: persistent volumes and persistent volume claims, which are used for data storage; stateful sets, which are used to deploy stateful applications like databases; and different types of Kubernetes services, and how to choose the right one for your needs.

How You’ll Learn

This course is four hours long. It contains a mix of animated theoretical explanations and hands-on demos for you to follow along.

Fun Facts

• Nana Janashia is a Docker Captain, AWS Container Hero, and a CNCF Ambassador. She mainly creates tutorials on DevOps concepts, like CI/CD, Docker, and Prometheus.
• TechWorld with Nana YouTube channel has over 700K subscribers where you’ll find plenty of DevOps full-fledged courses and tutorials for beginners. If you want to stay the pace with DevOps, you should subscribe to her channel!

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

2. DevOps with Kubernetes (University of Helsinki)

My 2nd pick for the best Kubernetes course is DevOps with Kubernetes from the University of Helsinki.

This course is a free open-source introductory course to Kubernetes with K3s and GKE, written by a web developer for web developers. You’ll develop software with a microservice architecture that utilizes Kubernetes to serve software that scales and deploys automatically, while managing it all. This course provides a free certificate of completion for anyone who completes all the exercises.

Having a community of developers to rely on when you face problems is crucial when learning, and luckily this course has its own Discord channel that anyone is free to join to ask questions.

To take this course, you should be familiar with containers, be able to independently develop web software, have knowledge of SQL databases, and know the basics of networking.

What You’ll Learn

You’ll start right off the bat by creating and running a Kubernetes cluster locally with k3d, and deploy a simple microservice. Then, you’ll fill in the details by studying Kubernetes internals such as debugging, networking, and storage.

In the next part of the course, you’ll focus on managing clusters. This will involve learning how Pods communicate with each other, how to group and label resources together, fine-tuning components using configuration files, StatefulSets, or Jobs, and lastly, monitoring the performance of your cluster.

Doing things on your local machine is fun and all, but it’s now time to explore cloud options, like Google’s Kubernetes Engine. You’ll create a deployment pipeline, enable continuous delivery in the cloud, choose between update strategies, use an open-source monitoring and alerting tool called Prometheus, and do GitOps — managing and deploying applications using Git as a single source of truth.

Finally, you’ll explore best practices for web development using Kubernetes. One of them is extending the Kubernetes API by defining your own custom resources, while another is monitoring and controlling network traffic using a service mesh. You’ll end this course by exploring several popular platforms that extend Kubernetes functionality like OpenShift and Knative.

How You’ll Learn

This course is 95 hours long. You’ll learn by going through the lecture articles and answering the exercises that appear within them. At the end of each part, you’ll be given a summary as well as a few coding questions to recap what you’ve learned.

To complete the course and get a certificate, you must submit solutions for all of the exercises in parts 1–5. There is no final exam for this course.

Fun Facts

• The course has 103 bookmarks on Class Central.
• University of Helsinki has partnered with Unity to create this course.
• This course is equivalent to 5 ECTS credits for University of Helsinki Students.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

3. Kubernetes Core Concepts (KubeAcademy)

My third pick for the best course to learn Kubernetes is KubeAcademy’s Kubernetes Core Concepts Learning Path.

This free learning path is much more hands-on than the first two picks in this ranking, with virtual labs and exercises. You’ll learn how to containerize with Docker and deploy a Kubernetes application, manage application lifecycle and configuration, networking considerations, workload options, and security.

No knowledge of containers or Kubernetes is required to take this course.

What You’ll Learn

The course begins with an introduction to containers with Docker, which provide a consistent environment for deploying applications and managing them after deployment.

But what if you have many different applications in many different containers? That’s where Kubernetes comes in. You’ll learn the fundamentals of cloud native infrastructure and understand how to deploy and manage applications in a Kubernetes environment, which will include approaches for handling development lifecycle and application configuration, with Pods and Containers.

You’ll cover cluster concepts where you can run many applications in a single Kubernetes cluster. Hence, you’ll study networking and traffic management to ensure the right user can access the right application. You may also have applications that require persistent storage, or have different configurations in different environments, or other requirements. You’ll learn how to satisfy these requirements. Finally, the course covers different types of workloads that can be run in Kubernetes and address security considerations for each.

How You’ll Learn

This learning path is 8 hours long. Each course in the series builds upon the last, and every lesson is followed by an in-browser virtual lab to reinforce the material covered.

Fun Facts

• VMware is a virtualization and cloud computing software provider. KubeAcademy is their learning platform for cloud technologies, taught by developer instructors at VMWare.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

4. Kubernetes Course – Full Beginners Tutorial (Bogdan Stashchuk)

Kubernetes Course – Full Beginners Tutorial is another excellent free course on Kubernetes.

This course is more developer-focused than the 1st course on this ranking, focusing more on the practical than technical aspects (which is why it is also quite short). By the end, you’ll be able to set up Kubernetes for your projects.

Prerequisites for this course include basic knowledge of containerization and experience with the Docker command-line tool.

What You’ll Learn

You’ll begin this course by covering the key features of Kubernetes, including terminology and the structure of a Kubernetes cluster. You’ll understand the structure of a Kubernetes cluster, including Nodes and Pods, and see how Kubernetes is used to deploy and manage containerized applications.

Then, you’ll install and set up kubectl and minikube — tools for running a single-node Kubernetes cluster — and build a small Kubernetes cluster locally on your computer and use it to scale deployments and perform rolling updates. You’ll also build a custom Docker image, push it to Docker Hub, and create a Kubernetes deployment based on this image.

Additionally, you’ll learn how to create services and deployments in Kubernetes using YAML configuration files and how to connect different deployments together. Finally, you’ll learn how to change the container runtime from Docker to CRI-O and deploy applications using CRI-O.

How You’ll Learn

This course is 3 hours long. You’ll learn by watching the course video and practicing what the instructor has taught in the video.

Fun Facts

• freeCodeCamp offers many other courses on various programming languages on their YouTube channel as well as on their website.
• Bogdan Stashchuk is a software developer and DevOps engineer that creates courses and tutorials on his YouTube channel and Udemy. Over 1M+ students have enrolled in his courses.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

5. Learn Kubernetes by Doing (A Cloud Guru)

Learn Kubernetes by Doing is a paid course jam-packed with hands-on labs and exercises to help you gain experience with Kubernetes for real-world usage. You’ll practice real-world scenarios in real cloud environments.

To be successful in this course, you should have a basic understanding of the Linux operating system, including system administrator concepts and containers.

What You’ll Learn

The course first covers Kubernetes basics where you’ll set up a local development environment. You’ll then discover the components of a Kubernetes cluster and how they work together by deploying a simple service and a microservice application.  You’ll also learn how to manage applications after deployment using tools like kubectl.

Next, you’ll delve into the theory behind Kubernetes and uncover how Kubernetes discovers and communicates with services, as well as some practical concepts like scheduling and managing the lifecycle of applications, and handling failures. You’ll also learn about persistent storage and how to use ClusterRole to ensure security.

This course will also cover testing strategies for your Kubernetes cluster, including how to perform integration and end-to-end testing, and monitoring and logging the performance and health of your Kubernetes cluster. Finally, you’ll learn advanced techniques for manually setting up and managing a Kubernetes cluster through bootstrapping and other methods, or in other words you’ll be “doing things the hard way.”.

How You’ll Learn

This course is 22 hours long. You’ll mainly learn by practicing through virtual labs that are powered by one or more Linux and their Cloud Playground platform.

Fun Facts

• A Cloud Guru is an online training platform established by its parent company, Pluralsight, for Information Technology. Most of the courses offered prepare students to take certification exams for the three major cloud providers (Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon Web Services).
• If you want a more detailed look at how to set up Kubernetes ‘the hard way’, look at the 8th course in this ranking.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

6. Getting Started with Kubernetes (Nigel Poulton)

Getting Started with Kubernetes is a short paid course with free trial on quickly getting up and running with Kubernetes — the most important container management technology in the world. By the end, you’ll have theory and practical skills required to use Kubernetes on the job.

What You’ll Learn

In this course, you’ll start off by learning about the background and purpose of Kubernetes. Then, you’ll dive into the architecture of Kubernetes and its main components and services, so that you can understand how it all works together to create a production-ready container infrastructure. After that, you’ll get hands-on with Kubernetes by using Pods to deploy apps to a network. You’ll also cover how to connect your app to a cloud load balancer, and explore features like scaling, self-healing, and rolling updates. But don’t worry — the course will go over these trendy buzzwords in detail so you can decide which ones you want to include in your deployments.

How You’ll Learn

This course is 3 hours long. You’ll learn by watching the lecture videos and following along with the instructor.

Fun Facts

• Nigel is a Docker Captain and expert in container technologies, with a background in designing and managing large-scale solutions in demanding corporate environments.  He is well-known in the tech industry for his videos and books on container technologies, with over 20 courses on Pluralsight.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

7. Introduction to Kubernetes (Linux Foundation)

Introduction to Kubernetes covers both basic and advanced concepts of Kubernetes architecture. If Linux is your beloved operating system, you’ll love this course.

This 14 weeks free-to-audit course teaches you how to deploy stand-alone and multi-tier applications, which will involve ConfigMaps, Secrets, and Ingress. Upon completion, you’ll have a solid understanding of Kubernetes and be able to begin using it to implement cloud native patterns.

Basic knowledge of Linux Command Line Interface (CLI) and container technology like Docker and rkt is required to take this course.

What You’ll Learn

Introduction to Kubernetes begins by discussing the recent trend of companies transitioning from monolith services to microservices, setting the stage for you to understand why Kubernetes was created in the first place and how it is used for container orchestration.

Next, you’ll study the architecture, primary components, and building blocks of Kubernetes. You’ll then be able to set up and access a Kubernetes cluster by yourself using the Minikube tool.

You’ll then learn in further detail about various ways of running and accessing applications on a deployed Kubernetes environment. Hence, you’ll learn about concepts like authentication and authorization for security, services for exposing applications, and ingresses for exposing services to external traffic, and ConfigMaps and Secrets for configuration and privacy. You’ll also uncover some of Kubernetes’ more advanced enterprise-class features, such as multi-node pod controllers, stateful application controllers, batch controllers. Finally, you’ll be shown several Kubernetes communities and how you can participate.

How You’ll Learn

This course is 42 hours long. You’ll learn by reading the course articles provided and taking notes. If you’re paying for the certificate, you’ll have access to the graded knowledge checks (quizzes) and the final exam that you’ll have to complete in order to obtain your certificate.

Fun Facts

• The course has 200 bookmarks on Class Central.
• Chris Pokorni is an instructor and founder of NQB8 Cloud Tech Consulting, with a background in Cloud Tech Consulting and experience teaching Kubernetes courses for both Administrators and Application Developers. He is certified in both CKA and CKAD and has worked as a consultant for small and large enterprises, leading workshops and designing solutions for HA Middleware/ESB, Datacenter Monitoring, and Hybrid Cloud Architecture.
• The Linux Foundation is a non-profit organization that promotes the use and development of open source software, with a focus on the Linux operating system. It provides resources and support for individuals and companies involved in open source projects, including training, certification programs, and conferences.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

8. Kubernetes the Hard Way (A Cloud Guru)

Kubernetes bootstrapping is usually done with the use of installers or scripts like kubeadm.

But to get a deeper understanding of how Kubernetes works and how it can be deployed in a production environment, the Kubernetes the Hard Way course ditches all of that in favor of doing it manually. In the process, you’ll be able to troubleshoot even the most obscure of issues that may arise when deploying it in a production environment.

Prior knowledge of Kubernetes is required to take this paid course.

What You’ll Learn

The following topics are what you’ll cover in this course:

• Introduction
• Getting Started
• Provisioning the CA and Generating TLS Certificates
• Generating Kubernetes Configuration Files for Authentication
• Generating the Data Encryption Config and Key
• Bootstrapping the etcd Cluster
• Bootstrapping the Kubernetes Control Plane
• Bootstrapping the Kubernetes Worker Nodes
• Configuring kubectl for Remote Access
• Networking
• Deploying the DNS Cluster Add-on
• Smoke Test
• Wrap-Up

How You’ll Learn

This course is 17 hours long. You’ll learn by watching the video tutorials and more significantly, through hands-on, practical learning experience by completing the virtual labs.

Fun Facts

• A Cloud Guru has helped 2M+ people and more than 4,000 organizations level up their cloud skills.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

9. Kubernetes for Developers: Core Concepts (Dan Wahlin)

Kubernetes for Developers: Core Concepts teaches developers the fundamental concepts of Kubernetes and how to use it to deploy and manage applications in a reliable and scalable way.

In this paid course with free trial, you will learn about key Kubernetes resources, the benefits they offer, and how to get started using them effectively. By the end of this course, you will have a solid understanding of how to use Kubernetes to manage and orchestrate your containers.

You’ll need to know what containers are to take this course.

What You’ll Learn

The course begins by providing a big picture look at what Kubernetes is, what it’s composed of, and different ways it can be used as a developer. You’ll learn how to set up Kubernetes on your local machine and interact with it using kubectl. Then, you’ll discover one of the key resources provided by Kubernetes, Pods, and understand how to use them, along with other resources such as deployments and services to host and expose your application to the outside world.

Next, you’ll explore the role of ConfigMaps and secrets in managing configuration data and handling sensitive information. You’ll also learn how to troubleshoot Pods. Finally, you’ll see how to bring all of these concepts together to get an application up and running in a Kubernetes cluster.

How You’ll Learn

This course is 5 hours long. You’ll learn through a combination of lecture videos and hands-on demonstrations with the instructor.

Fun Facts

• Dan Wahlin is the founder of Wahlin Consulting and an expert in various programming languages and technologies, including JavaScript, Angular, Node.js, C#, ASP.NET MVC, Web API, Docker, and Kubernetes. He is a Google GDE and Docker Captain, and has previously been recognized as a Microsoft MVP and Regional Director. He has also authored over 30 Pluralsight courses.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

10. Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) with Practice Tests (KodeKloud Training)

If you’re planning on taking the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) certification exam to demonstrate your hands-on skills and expert knowledge of Kubernetes, you’ll need a lot of practice.

Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) with Practice Tests is here to help you with that. This paid course focuses on advanced topics on Kubernetes and in-depth discussion into the various concepts around deploying a high availability cluster for a production use case, understanding more about scheduling, monitoring, maintenance, securities, storage, and troubleshooting.

You’ll also have access to a community Slack channel where you can interact with the instructors and other students. The course is also constantly updated to keep up with CKA exam’s quarterly updates.

To take this course, you’ll need a basic understanding of Docker and YAML.

What You’ll Learn

• Core concepts of cluster architecture: Pods, ReplicaSets, Deployments, and services
• Scheduling: including manual scheduling, DaemonSets, labels and selectors, resource requests and limits, and configuring multiple schedulers
• Logging and monitoring: options for the Kubernetes cluster and applications hosted on them, and how to view and manage the logs.
• Application lifecycle management: rolling updates, rollbacks, configuring applications, scaling applications, and health checks
• Cluster maintenance: operating system upgrades, cluster upgrades, best practices for upgrading, disaster recovery, and backup and restore methodologies
• Kubernetes security primitives: authentication mechanisms, TLS certificates, and securing various components within the cluster
• Networking: pod networking, service networking, and ingress networking
• Working with persistent storage: types of persistent storage, attaching persistent storage to applications, and configuring persistent storage for applications
• Troubleshooting: techniques for application, control plane, worker node, and network issues and failures.
• Advanced topics in Kubernetes: custom controllers, custom resource definitions, operator frameworks, among others.

How You’ll Learn

This course is 22 hours long.  The course provides hundreds of coding exercises where you can practice solving Kubernetes coding challenges in live lab environments directly in your browser. Hints and solutions are provided, and your work will be immediately validated and receive feedback.

Fun Facts

• KodeKloud Training is a CNCF certified Kubernetes training partner.
• KodeKloud Training also offer other courses on Kubernetes as well:
  • Kubernetes for the Absolute Beginners – Hands-on is for beginners with no experience with containers or container orchestration.
  • Kubernetes Certified Application Developer (CKAD) with Tests is for application developers who are looking to learn how to design, build, and configure cloud native applications.
• Mumshad Mannambeth is the CEO and founder of KodeKloud, where he creates interactive and hands-on training to make learning fun.

If you’re interested in this course, you can find more information about the course and how to enroll here.

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