The Best Free Training

This week we are celebrating our first anniversary of The Best Free Training blog. It’s been an amazing year! I’ve discovered all sorts of great freebies and many creative people generating them. Better yet… I have learned all sorts of new stuff! My thanks to the many publishers of great free training and education materials that I’ve reviewed here. You are truly making the world a better place! And my thanks to all you who visit this blog and support our advertisers!

Now there’s some good news and some bad news. The good news: I’ve published hundreds of reviews and original articles. The bad news: It takes quite a while to sift through them all to find what you want.

So to make things easier for all you seekers of freebies, I’ve put together some PDF collections of selected reviews which you can download to your computer. These collections contain my full reviews and comments, as well as “hot links” that will take you directly to these free resources. There are three Collections, so far. But I hope to add more soon.

Read the rest of this entry »

Topic: Distilled notes on 25 great philosophers and teachers
Format: Each of the 25 PhilosophersNotes contains: one (approx.) 20-minute MP3 audio and one 6-page (approx.) PDF summary
Reviewer/email: Mike G – greers_pm@yahoo.com

Now this is very cool, indeed! Just in time for your holiday giving: A free gift subscription for you to Brian Johnson’s amazing PhilosophersNotes collection. And better yet: For everyone on your holiday list — When you sign up, you also get an unlimited number of free gift subscription’s to give.

As I’ve said before, I’m a big fan of Brian Johnson, “head philosopher” at PhilosophersNotes.com. Philosophers are supposed to quote great thinkers. In this collection Brian Johnson does this and brings you insights from: Stephen Covey, Ghandi, Emerson, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, Viktor Frankl, Byron Katie, Eckhart Tolle, Martin Seligman, Rumi, Marcus Aurelius, and many more. But Philosophers are not supposed to make this Homer Simpson noise: “Whoo Hooo!” Nor are philosophers supposed to repeatedly exclaim, “How cool is that!?” But Brian persists in making such proclamations as he joyfully shares his enthusiasm for the works of 25 great philosophers and teachers. In this collection , you’ll get over 8 hours of MP3 downloads (about 20-minutes each) and around 150 pages of companion PDF files.

Get (& give!) your free subscriptions at: http://philosophersnotes.com/bestfreetraining

This week marks the first anniversary of this blog. Looking back over the year’s posts, I see some patterns emerging. In this post, I’d like to share with you my 5 favorite sources of high-quality, free training and education. These folks all make it easy for me! I know they’re always churning out great new stuff on a regular basis, so I visit them often.

And here’s a challenge for you: Why don’t you check them out for yourself, find some new great stuff, then write a review. I’ll be happy to publish your review right here!

1. Alison — Alison’s products are consistently well-designed, easy-to-use, and cover lots of business and technical topics.

• Most recent product review on The Best Free Training:
  Alison ABC IT (1-2-3) [Basic Computing & IT Skills]

Go to — http://alison.com/index.php

2. BBC Learning – BBC’s training and educational materials are beautiful, humorous, fun, multi-media, even surprising! At the same time, they are well-designed from an instructional point of view.

• Most recent product review on The Best Free Training:
  Spanish Steps [Beginner’s Course in Practical Spoken Spanish]

Go to — http://www.bbc.co.uk/learning/

3. Open Yale — Open Yale is accumulating quite a collection of comprehensive, semester-long academic materials. Of all the university-level open learning providers that I’ve seen, Open Yale seems to provide the best instructional design, most highly integrated learning materials, and easy-to-use downloads.

• Most recent product review on The Best Free Training:
  Game Theory from Open Yale

Go to — http://oyc.yale.edu/

4. Learn Out Loud – Plenty of high-quality freebies, newsletters, links to other freebies, and user reviews. Find out how much content you can cram into your i-Pod or MP3 player and start Learning Out Loud when you are waiting in line or exercising.

• Most recent review on The Best Free Training:
  Zaadz Notes: Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman

Go to — http://www.learnoutloud.com/

5. Brian Johnson — Brian Johnson is someone to watch. Simply put, he’s changed my life with his PhilosophersNotes and Zaadz notes and big ideas. Brian’s freebies appear on LearnOutLoud and several other places on the net. So I try to follow him online and see what he’s up to next! (A very cool surprise may be forthcoming from Brian for all you freebie fans! So stay tuned!)

• Most recent review on The Best Free Training:
  PhilosophersNotes Video Collection: Inspire Yourself, Motivate Yourself, Find Joy!

Go to — http://philosophersnotes.com/bestfreetraining

Topic: Game theory and strategic thinking in the context of economics, politics, and more.
Format: 24 75-minute class sessions; Video, audio, and printed lecture transcripts; PDF versions of assignments, blackboard notes, and more.
Reviewer/email: Mike G – greers_pm@yahoo.com

From the website: “This course is an introduction to game theory and strategic thinking. Ideas such as dominance, backward induction, Nash equilibrium, evolutionary stability, commitment, credibility, asymmetric information, adverse selection, and signaling are discussed and applied to games played in class and to examples drawn from economics, politics, the movies, and elsewhere.” … HUH?? But not to worry! Your instructor, Ben Polak, Professor of Economics and Management at Yale University, says this course is “reasonably hard, but reasonably fun!”

(Continued in Comment.)

Topic: Basic computer and IT (Information Technology) skills and business applications
Format: Narrated slides with animations, software screen shots, interactive practice, and quizzes [free registration required]
Reviewer/email: Mike G – greers_pm@yahoo.com

This “course” is really a curriculum… an extensive collection of well-designed mini courses and lessons that will introduce you to everything you need to know about computers and how businesses and organizations use them. What’s more, it’s got plenty of hands-on, interactive, step-by-step training in the “big four” software applications (MS Word, Excel, Access, & Powerpoint) and use of the internet. And no computer experience is needed. From the website, comes this understatement: “The ALISON Basic Computing (ABC) IT course is for anyone who needs to learn basic computing skills, or has a need to demonstrate to an international standard that they are fully competent in the use of a personal computer and common computer applications.” This is simply the best introductory computer course I’ve ever seen!

Read the rest of this entry »

Topic: Using patents, copyrights, and trademarks to protect your business and creative works
Format: Web-based, narrated & animated slide show [free registration required]
Reviewer/email: Mike G – greers_pm@yahoo.com

This is a great introduction to the use of patents, copyrights, and trademarks to protect your creative works and your business assets. What’s the difference between a utility patent and a design patent? How do state and federal trademarks differ? What are the four elements of a proper copyright? Answers to these and other questions are provided in this clean, appealing series of narrated slides from SCORE Online Training.

(Continued in Comment.)

Topic: Motivational, inspirational, gratitude-inducing collection of videos
Format: Web-based collection of videos
Reviewer/email: Mike G – greers_pm@yahoo.com

Are you feeling discouraged?… angry? … a little hopeless? Then this amazing collection of 26 free videos compiled by Brian Johnson at his PhilosophersNotes website is just what you need. Witness the triumph of a four-fingered concert pianist and experience powerful, moving videos featuring Michael Jordan, Steve Jobs, Dr. Randy Pausch, Tony Robbins, and many other less-famous (but equally amazing) heroes. And while you’re there, pick up your free PhilosophersNotes audio download and PDF on Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth and John Elliot’s Overachievement.

PhilosophersNotes video collection: http://www.philosophersnotes.com/videos

[See Comment below for list of related Best Free Training items.]