BUSINESS - Learn Something New: Online Courses for $15 and Less

If your New Year’s resolution is to increase your knowledge, Udemy is offering major discounts on more than 17,000 online courses.

Interested in Business Administration? The popular An Entire MBA in One Course is being offered for $15 - a 92% discount.

The Ultimate Excel Programmer teaches how to make spreadsheets do more of the legwork for you and is on sale for $15.

Web development, photography, writing, social media, design, software and more are all offered by Udemy.

The deep discounts are available through Tuesday, January 10th. 

But how can you tell if the course is good?

An online learning platform that allows anyone to host their own video courses, Udemy does not require specialized expertise or credentials to create and sell a course on the platform.

Which means courses go from bad to great.

Some tips for finding a quality online course:

• Read the course curriculum - make sure it covers what you want to learn.
• Meet the requirements - prerequisites are listed that you will need to meet.
• Watch the course intro and previews - the instructor should be clear, organized, fit your learning style and should show (not just by talking) plenty of examples and practices.
• Check out the instructor - their experience should be relevant to what you want to learn and if they also offer a free course, enroll and check them out before investing money.
• See if the course has been updated - a committed instructor updates a course to keep it relevant.
• Analyze the good reviews - pay attention to the ones from people with photographs and aren’t generic - “This is the best course ever!” - there are fabricated reviews so you want to find the genuine ones.
• Read the bad reviews - if they offer a detailed review of the course, there will be valuable information in them.
• Try it - Udemy offers a refund within 30 days if you start the course and find it’s not right for you.

The number of organizations offering online learning is constantly growing - Coursera and University of the People are just a couple of examples.

Websites like MoocLab have reviews of online course providers to help you find the right provider and course for you.

If you’re looking for free online college courses from the world’s top universities, visit Academic Earth.

2017 can be a year of learning new skills - for a great deal or even free.