e-learning: a new frontier

Coined by David Cormier in 2008, MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) are quickly gaining in popularity and are now all the rage in education. Be it basic arithmetic, courses in art and history or cooking lessons, learning anything is just one skill away. These days many leading colleges, graduate schools and companies are investing significant resources into free education.

Khan Academy
Close to the Bengali people's heart, this online education forum first gained popularity in Bangladesh thanks to its founder who claims a Bengali lineage.
Khan Academy offers free courses in a range of subjects where micro YouTube videos make the learning process interactive. One can also post comments, talk to the other students and receive medals and prizes in the virtual education world. From courses in history, to mathematics and science, Khan Academy has something on offer for everyone, free of cost.

Courseera
Offering 500+ courses, from more than 100 partners worldwide, including Duke University in the US, Peking University (China) and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Courseera is one of the most popular online education platforms in the world.
One popular course offered by Duke in Courseera was 'A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior' that was taught by Dan Ariely, author of the best selling "Predictably Irrational."

Udacity
A for-profit organisation Udacity is an educational organisation founded by Sebastian Thrun, David Stavens, and Mike Sokolsky who gave the name keeping in mind the company's desire to be "audacious for you, the student".
They offer courses that were mainly focused on computer science courses with options to even learn basics of programming along with mathematics courses. There are courses that one needs to pay for to enroll, however there are ample free course options at different skill levels such as Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced.

Edx
An online forum that provides myriad courses from reputed universities thus confirming the fact that these are the years of online education where Ivy League schools and their standard of education is right at your doorstep.
Edx is easy to navigate, where one can register through Facebook or their Google IDs making the site user-friendly.
From programming, to the science of happiness, challenges of global poverty name it and Edx most likely has it. Some of the major contributors to Edx are Stanford University, UC Berkeley, MIT, Harvard, University of Queensland and many more.
Although a novelty previously, online education is gaining popularity by leaps and bounds and one can only imagine the scope that this holds. There are thousands of sites online, Udemy, MIT Open CourseWare, TED, iTunes U that cater to all your desires, want to learn Spanish, learn how to bake, become a forensic scientist the world of education is now one with many possibilities where lectures or learning will simply not be limited to the closed doors of classrooms.
The possibilities are endless and the book lover and nerd inside me is overjoyed at the prospect.