NASCA Learning Centre
There are a number of organisations and sites that are offering free and discounted courses online. Many have them have announced free access to their pro versions. Of course, many of them are within a specific timeframe. Here’s a list that could help you:
Achieve3000 is offering free access to resources for differentiated literacy instruction. Educators can access three different programs. Achieve3000 Literacy at Home offers access to non-fiction articles at three reading levels with topics covering science, social studies and current events. Premium licenses for Actively Learn, for grades 6 -12, provides thousands of texts, including contemporary and classic literature, with collaboration and discussion tools to facilitate interactive remote instruction for English language arts, science and social studies. For students without internet, the company is offering “Literacy Printable Packets,” a set of text sets with 20 printable articles and questions. The company said those text packets add up to a month’s worth of content differentiated for students who are at-, below- and above- grade-level in their reading abilities. Lessons can be downloaded and sent home by email or printed out. https://achieve3000.com/community-resources/remote-learning-2020/
Addigy, a cloud-based Apple device management platform, has announced free 60-day access for schools. The program helps organizations deploy, manage and track new and existing Apple devices from a single console; automate IT tasks and implement IT policies related to deploying software, updating security settings, running scripts, managing groups of users and distributing and updating software; and troubleshoot problems for users remotely and in real-time. https://addigy.com/covid-19-addigy-60/?utm_content=covid-19-addigy-60
Adobe is offering free access to Creative Cloud tools through May for home use by students attending schools that currently only provide lab access through May. https://helpx.adobe.com/enterprise/kb/covid-19-education-labs.html
Coursera is offering a wide range of free and discounted courses. This is available through May 31, 2020. For instance, mental health and well-being courses, free online courses for high school students on subjects like calculus to guitar for beginners. In addition, there are courses on career development, cloud technology, statistics, soft skills, gaming, classical poetry and much more.
The Open University has an excellent, two-week course that is designed to help you start writing your own fiction novel. The course will help you learn key basic points about how you can design characters and weave storylines. It even offers a free statement of participation at the end of the course.
The Professional Photographers of America has opened up their widely acclaimed and vast collection of online photography courses to the world, and for the next two weeks, all of their 1,100+ courses on photography, ranging from the very basics to intricate and detailed, are available for you to access for free. The art of photography, as we all know, is much vaunted and works as an incredibly satisfying passion.
The University of Helsinki in Finland is offering a free Artificial Intelligence (AI) course suitable for practically anyone — from an IT or management professional, to directorial executives, students, school and college teachers, journalists, technical writers, and more. It can be completed in your own time (but the University suggests following a six-week curriculum), and offers a great beginner course into understanding and learning the very key concepts of AI. It can help you get rid of misinformation around the subject, and is a great place to learn even more details of AI about.
