A Review of Learn.com

I jumped at the chance to get a free trial from Learn.com to try out one of their online educational courses. I’ve spoken in support of online education many times. I have only a high school diploma (I know! It must come as a real shocker to you who have been wowed by my brilliance and wit, lol), and I have long felt the need (and desire) for more education. I am also seeing a monumental shift in educational in general- I think in a decade or so (perhaps sooner) colleges will no longer be the first thing we think of when we think of continuing education. Those “Liberal Arts” degrees are already useless in today’s economy. I believe (and have always believed) that learning a SKILL, learning a TRADE, is what is necessary. I love online education for this reason- it teaches job skills and trades, for the purpose of APPLYING the knowledge toward a life vocation, not toward a piece of paper that says “Degree” on it.

Anyway, I’ve been checking out Learn.com. This is a very cool site! This is the kind of website you want to check out, you educators, parents, and students. Learn.com specializes in courses for learning new job skills or honing existing ones, so it’s suitable both for beginning or continuing education.

Learn.com also offers accredited courses from some very exclusive online degrees from The College Network, George Washington University, Boston University, eCornell, and others. Plus, there are the Learn.com courses themselves, which are extremely well done.

Obviously, some courses are more expensive than others; you may need to check out some easy cash advances for financing your education. But Learn.com does offer some courses for free, too!!! This is a great way to check out the website and see their style. All the courses I saw were both useful (Learn.com has the largest library of online training courses), with courses in marketing, sales, nursing, etc; and some were even fun- everything from programming and web design to learning how to juggle!

I signed up for the “Personal Skills” course of “Receptionists and Information Clerks: Advanced Course.” It’s a very thorough roster of all the skills necessary for such a career. Learn.com has a unique kind of scoring system called the “Skill Score” that employers can look at to see how well you did in the completed course (as a resume boost). This is a terrific concept!

Some of the classes I get for this course I’m taking:

• Basics: Math and Grammar
• Communication Telephone I
• Business Ethics I
• Customer Service: Identifying Expectations
• Computer Use
• Microsoft Office: Entry
• …and others

There are interactive lessons, both teaching and quizzing. So far, I’ve taken the course on percents and conversions (and didn’t do too bad!). You can see in the screenshot below all the lessons involved in just the Math section.

And there’s a bit of humor in the courses, as well. I thought the Telephone Etiquette section was very well done, and was hilarious- they talked about “P.E.D.S” which is Phone Etiquette Deficiency Syndrome. LOL! They had a very humorous teaching video for it.

So if you’ve got a hankering for learning more, or your kids are looking for a terrific alternative to college (as mine have been), Learn.com looks fabulous. Check it out!