Free Online Courses

[Wandila Simon]

I would like to have links to and advice on free online training in Project Management ,Website Development/Designing and any other courses that would be of help to espcially Telecentre managers/Operators and members of staff who are non proffessionals in fields of project management, website development, and any other related skills , but have the passion for using ICTs for development.

Francis Mwathi sent to me some of the sites.

Project management

http://www.hyperthot.com/project.htm
http://www.softwareprojects.org/
http://www.prince2.com/
http://www.pmtrainingonline.com/site/1648622/page/853567

Website designing
www.w3schools.com/
www.educationonlineforcomputers.com/training/Free-Web-Development-T...
www.2createawebsite.com/
www.webmastercourse.com/

Iam inviting you fellow members to discuss this issue , for capacity building is very important if we are to achieve better results.

Thanks

[Md. Saifur rahman Khan]

Dear friend,
Thanx a lot for submitting this helpful resources for the members to develop and improve their skills in ICT.

[Masahudu M. Marhey]

Hello All,

Indeed as they say great minds think alike, this happens to be the thought of many telecentre managers in the sub-region and I'm very glad for seeing this wonderful and more educative suggestions by you. Keep the spirit of alive for the benefit of all members.

Marhey

[Wangchuk Chungyalpa]

The following are some sites which I think is fairly popular among web designers and developers:

• http://www.joomla.com
• http://www.webmonkey
• http://www.coolhomepages.com/

There is huge amount of information on the internet pertaining to web design and development. Based on my experience searching the web, here are a few things to keep in mind to obtain best results:

1. Define your objective for research. It has to be precise. For example, web designing is a OK objective, however web designing using Adobe Photoshop or even better Web template design using Adobe Photoshop is much more objective and precise and will narrow your search results significantly.

2. Develop a set of keywords to perform search on the web. “Web designing” is ok key word. Utilize your objectives.

3. Develop a criteria to evaluate your findings. Usually it will include your objectives and more. For example, some criteria’s to use if you are looking for web designing are:

a. Sample templates availability
b. Tutorial quality – video and text
c. Tutorial levels – advanced, intermediate or basic.

4. Select a max of 5 to 7 sites. Tapping into many sites is a waste of time and will provide low quality results.

Good luck on your search !

[Wandila Simon]

Thankyou for adding more helpful sites.

Simon

[Austin Strickland]

If continued, this post can become a good resource post for all the members.

If you are talking about web designers and developers resources, I would like to add some sites to the collection. Images are most important in the designing so here are some free creative commons image resources like deviantArt, iStockPhoto, and Flickr.

For tutorials I would recommend Tuts Plus. It has a great resource of almost all sort of tutorials for designers and developers.

If someone is interested in joining a web designing forum, Talk Mania is my favorite.

I agree with you that Joomla is one of the best and the most favorite Content Management System for developers (it is my favorite too) but when you ar talking about collection of resources, Drupal is also good enough but it is for the professionals only. And considering the ease and popularity of Wordpress, you can't ignore it even if it is used mostly by beginners.

In the end, for the resource of distance learning online courses, I would recommend SchoolsGalore. You will find most of the courses in almost all the fields. But I never searched for the free distance learning courses there so that's not a guarantee.

And my other recommended sites like Webmonkey, Joomla and W3Schools are already mentioned above.

I would come up with more resources as I get to know about them.

Good Luck

[Dr. Muhammad Afzal Khan]

that is much helpful for improment of organistional development skills. i am realy gland that see that sites, which sent by francis Mawathi

[Mathias Walwana]

I would wish to reach my appreciation to you for such a great idea.
we really need to keep our selves updated with current information and the only way out i guess has to be through trainings.
To the rest of the members I only call on you to make use of the provided sites and then we shall see our selves through
Thanks very much
Mathias

[Marta Mans]

Hello

Since 2005, from Fundación Esplai (FE) we have been developing distance learning tasks for telecentre facilitators as a National telecentre Academy of Spain (of course the language is spanish). This courses are free for the telecentre operators of our networks , and we have a methodology and a model of training that take profit from the knowledge that already exist on the net. Here you can see more information and the resume of the course we offer that could give you some ideas.Any information you need , don’ t hesitate to ask us-
http://esplai.org/infoelearning/en/cursos.html

[Claire Peque Fernandez]

A pleasant day to all of us,

These links are very good. Thank you for sharing these sites.

I remember myself tying to learn website development in Joomla and Adobe Photoshop. I did not have formal trainings on these topics but I was pretty sure that I needed these tools for the development of government website and photo editing.

One good foundation I had was the availability of experts or officemates who were using these tools. While I was learning online, there were some commands or topics which I did not clearly understood and at times, I was so excited that I wanted to skip some topics and jump over to the advance topics which I wanted to learn about.

If some friends here would need assistance on web development, I would be very much willing to help.

Let us continue to share and care :)

[Claire Peque Fernandez]

I think one good initiative for some telecentre who do not have a website would be to develop one. With this, we will know more about the telecentre. For our PhilCeC Network, there are some information on each PhilCeCNet member in the www.philcecnet.ph website.

Maybe Telecentre.org can host the sites or just a page for each telecentre :) but for others who would want more space and could not host their own sites, I know of a server in US who offers a domain name for only $8.99 with free web hosting :) for one year using "cpanel" for the website administration. The cheapest one I found and tried online so far...if some friends know of cheaper ones, please inform me too, thanks.

[Shipra Sharma]

Hi Simon,
Let me add this web address- http://opentraining.unesco-ci.org/cgi-bin/page.cgi?d=1to your growing trajectory of free online courses for telecentre managers. It has a number of courses, some of which can be very useful for the telecentre managers.
Anyway, a very good initiative on your part. All the best!!

[Wandila Simon]

This is realy a helpful link , It will help many .You may add more if you about them.

Thanks

Simon