By Debbie Papadakis

debbiedepapadakis@yahoo.com

 

As an educator, I believe many things can be done by individuals. It is up to individuals to provide a road mapped out for the younger generation to grow and thrive in this world. How do we carve out these roads for our children to follow? How do we set the example? What happens when things change in our lives, how do we manage to strive for the dreams we had, or the dreams we cling on to, wanting to live, showing our children to live life with Education striving in to the future?

In the light of things in Europe, the economic crisis has taken its toll in delaying enrolments into institutions of education and we have even seen the closure of University Faculties and Institutions. We have seen student unrest as fees further hindering the future of the younger generation. In Greece, the middle class have died, as we have seen more than 4.5 thousand people take their lives at a time when the mass media vividly reports the austerity measures imposed by the IMF and the EU through Troika and naturally Germany drawing the lines for the banks thrive in while the stringent economic policies and political policies deprive societies of people to survive, let alone provide a future for our children to survive in allowing them to dream and be educated. Earlier this year the EU held a commission stating that the high unemployment rate of young people was to be absorbed by encouraging them to enter education and retraining programs that would assure employment. However, what has been witnessed is the opposite. Sure, it can be said we need an economic crisis that brings about benefits such as wage reductions creating a society of people willing to just work and work. How is the society handling this?

While the current government in Greece is busy imposing ‘society – unfriendly policies’  without rooting out corruption and pursuing the justice for all the scandals that have brought this country to a slow death by political figures that have become wealthy in previous governments; it is successfully terrorizing the society of people which has given way for extremists to wage war sporadically providing ample fuel for the mass media to lap  up and project while detrimental issues are drawn and more austerity is imposed on the people of Greece. What is happening in other parts of the world?

In other parts of the world individuals in prominent positions in Universities are offering FREE COURSES for young people to enrol in and  after successfully completing the course they get DIPLOMAS . This initiative was taken by many Professors at Universities in the USA and Japan as a response in helping young people to strive for their dreams and to work. Instead of just caring about the gain of wealth through the banking system, Should Europe be looking at educating the young  set by others  as examples and should they follow?

Good advice would be to turn off TV and LOG IN and enroll for the future!

FREE ONLINE COURSES

EdX
EdX offers interactive online courses and MOOCs from the world’s best universities and institutions. Online classes are available from MITx, HarvardX, BerkeleyX, UTx and many others. Topics include biology, business, chemistry, computer science, economics, finance, electronics, engineering, food and nutrition, history, humanities, law, literature, math, medicine, music, philosophy, physics, science, statistics and more. EdX is a nonprofit online initiative created by founding partners Harvard and MIT.

Coursera
Coursera is an education platform that partners with top universities and organizations worldwide, to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. The site says it envisions a future where everyone has access to a world-class education and the course aims to empower people with education that will improve their lives and the lives of the communities they live in.

Alison
ALISON is an online learning community filled with free, high-quality resources to help you develop workplace skills. There are three million learners choosing from 600 courses. Certificates of completion are available upon finishing each course. The goal is to develop professional employment skills and increased fact-based knowledge. The courses are offered in many languages.

TED
TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a global set of conferences on all manner of topics from around the world. TED Events are held in many countries and showcase the world’s finest minds. Past speakers have included Bill Clinton, Jane Goodall, Malcolm Gladwell, Al Gore, Gordon Brown, Richard Dawkins, Bill Gates, Bono, Google founders and all manner of nobel laureates. The speakers are given 18 minutes to present their thoughts. As of April 2014, over 1,700 talks are available free online. TED talks have been watched by millions of viewers around the globe.

Khan Academy
All of the site’s resources are available to anyone. It doesn’t matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler,principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology. The materials and resources of the global classroom are available free of charge. Students can make use of the site’s extensive library of content, including interactive challenges, assessments, and videos from any computer with access to the web. Coaches, parents and teachers have unprecedented visibility into what their students are learning and doing on Khan Academy.

JustinGuitar
The best guitar lessons on the internet are free! There are over 25,000 people per day using the site to learn how to play the guitar and over 750 completely free guitar lessons.

BBC Languages
The BBC offers online language courses for those who want a quick fix for a holiday or those interested in learning English. As part of the BBC World Service, BBC Learning English has been teaching English to global audiences since 1943, offering free audio, video and text materials to learners around the world. From our mobile English courses in Bangladesh and Latin America to our online offer for millions of Chinese learners, BBC Learning English provides multimedia English language teaching materials to meet learners needs. On their part, English speakers can learn 40 different languages!

Duolingo
Learn a foreign language for free along with another 38 million users of the site. Duolingo promises that you can learn a language using their online resources in just two years. As of September 14, 2014, Duolingo offers Latin American Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Danish and Irish courses for English speakers as well as American English for Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Hungarian, Romanian, Japanese, Hindi, Indonesian and Korean speakers as well as many other combinations of languages. It is available on the Web, iOS and Android platforms. In a recent independent study, professors from the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of South Carolina found that when using Duolingo for 34 hours, students learn the equivalent of one university semester of language instruction.

Drawspace
The professional site teaches you how to make realistic drawings. There are hundreds of amazing art lessons to help you improve your technique and artistic knowhow.

Unplugthetv
If you like random learning, then unplugthetv is for you! It is a website with intellectually stimulating video content that is selected for you to work through instead of watching TV! The website was created to replace mind-numbing TV with mind-opening educational material. The site has hundreds of educational videos to help you learn or gain a new perspective. Unlike Youtube there are no videos of talking dogs or double rainbows.

No Excuse List
Tutorials from around the internet are gathered here, from MOOC courses to cooking, computers and other stuff you can learn for free in the comfort of your own home.

Athens University
Following the example of other prestigious universities and educational institutions, Athens University announced that it would be offering MOOCs later this month. The university said it plans to develop 500 free classes between now and next September. The courses will offer free access to multimedia educational content that will include slides, notes, videos, podcasts and interactive elements.
The Athens University aims to develop open online classes offered for free to the public at large.

The viewpoints expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the editors and publishers of Proto Thema. If you would like to contribute to our site and run your personal story on this issue or any other, please e-mail us on themanews.com@gmail.com