Whenever we’re trying to learn something new, “Google” is the most intuitive action we take. Google is certainly useful a lot of times, but I bet everyone also has frustrated experiences after Googling and seeing all the advertisements and commercial-heavy content on the search engine result pages.
I started my self-learning journey last year. I started my own YouTube channel, hosted and set up a personal blog, designed my own logo and arts, and learned a lot about computer science, especially front-end, all by researching and learning online.
It sounds like a lot to learn within 1 year of self-learning. It’s not merely the result of knowing the fact that there are numerous resources out there online, but actually more about how to find the resources that are most suitable to my needs and those I find the most value in.
In this article, I’ll share 6 ways to find free and valuable resources that I personally have benefitted from along my process of self-learning online.
1. Have a chat with your friends
The first approach is to chat with your friends. You might have one or two best friends whom you can trash talk with at any given moment during the day. It’s nice to have them.
But no. Here I mean those you don’t chat very frequently with.
These people could be your colleagues, friends from high school, classmates from other departments, or a new friend you meet either online or on the street.
Why?
When we’re learning something new, it’s easy for us to fall into a loop and ignore the outside world, especially when we’re really devoted to understanding some brand-new concepts. While this could cause two problems.
First, if you’re learning a new concept in the wrong way (meaning a much more difficult way than it normally should be), you might not know you’re wrong and could take you to an unwanted destination.
The other problem is that when you’re stuck with something, you could feel trapped and get frustrated as you put more time and effort but still fail to understand a thing.
Chatting with people that we’re not too familiar with can give you new perspectives. Sometimes, you get a new way to tackle the problem you have while having a 10-minute conversation with one of your colleagues.
If you know someone who’s an expert in the field that you’re currently learning, it’s even better! You should definitely buy him/her a coffee and ask that person to advise you along your learning process. It’s probably the easiest way to get free resources that only the professionals and experts in the industry know.
2. Take online courses
I understand not everyone can make friends with ease or find time to chat with people, especially we had better practice social distancing at this point.
Here’s one alternative you can try out: Go onto EdX, Coursera, Skillshare, or any other well-known online learning platforms and register yourself an account.
Enroll in courses that you think you’ll benefit from according to your learning goals. Try free trials. Cancel them when you’re going to get charged by the platform.
A lot of professors and teachers teaching these online courses are kind enough to share the most helpful resources they’ve collected throughout the years. They are also the people who know the best about learners’ difficulties and questions.
If you have extra time, then join the forum or discussion group of the course you’re taking. These students normally are self-motivated to go online to learn, and therefore, are very active and engaging.
3. Read non-fiction books
Books are treasures. I can’t emphasize this more.
I formed the habit of finishing at least 1 book a week since last winter. Before that, I barely read.
Many of you who are reading might all agree with the enormous values that books bring us. But how we could find free resources from reading these books?
To clarify, I’m not saying you should go to the author’s personal blog or website and download their PDFs (which in the end are just various forms of marketing materials), although from time to time you may find that helpful too.
Authors nowadays LOVE to borrow ideas from other books. I can easily name a few books that mention James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits. And it hasn’t been 3 years since Atomic Habits was published.
This pattern of borrowing ideas surely doesn’t just appear on James Clear alone. Whenever you find authors mentioning other books, you should make a note and come back to look up that book after you finish the one you’re reading.
Apart from that, a lot of authors have a great habit of citing every example they mention in their books. This could be research, an experiment, or a blog post.
For research resources, websites like Google Scholar and ResearchGate, or the research database your school is using right now are possibly providing these resources for free download. For blog posts, of course, you can easily find them online with the corresponding URLs.
If you’re the kind of person who finds it interesting to dig deeper into the topic or learning the whole story of experiments and stories, this is going to open a new world for you.
4. Change your default search engine
Going back to the point I made in the introduction paragraph, we’re certainly not always satisfied with the results of the Google search result page.
For example, if you type in “[Learning topic] + courses”, there is a high chance that you might find either ads or costly courses. This is due to the business model of Google and the SEO strategy implemented by companies and platforms that are selling these courses as their major income.
A lot of valuable blog posts and articles are buried. Not until you go to page 3 or later you may be able to find them. There are also times that you just can’t find the one that’s worthy of your time. One way of solving this problem of content distribution is by changing your default search engine in your browser settings.
Note that search engines are different from browsers. Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox are browsers, while Google Search, DuckDuckGo, and Bing are famous search engines many of us are using to generate search results for us to view on browsers.
Changing search engines means showing different search results due to different logics of algorithms, which also means new chances to discover valuable resources you’ve never seen on your previous search engine.
If you’re on Chrome, like the majority of people, then you can either follow the steps below:
Open Chrome and select the upper right More Options icon (three dots).
Select Settings > Search Engine.
Choose a new search engine option.
Or you can also set a different search engine by using Chrome extensions.
5. Dive deeper into your interests
If you’re like me, I’m literally interested in learning any given topic at this stage, you might also be scratching the surface of many of the topics you’re investing your time in.
Since last month, I started to focus on a limited number of fields I’d learn in the following month, and this change of learning strategy has allowed me to discover a lot more cost-free resources.
Take UI/UX design, for example, I wanted to learn how it would be like to work as a UI/UX designer and how the learning curve would look like. I looked for blog posts, asked friends, took online courses, and watched videos online.
This video from AJ&Smart actually provides a piece of information saying that there’s a way to take part in a UI/UX career development program that’s worth over $7,000 dollars for FREE if you are a resident in Germany and meet certain criteria. That will require more preparation and time to go through the details, but it certainly is an extremely valuable resource that I discovered through watching this particular video.
Cases like this would only take place if we learners decided to dive deeper and learn more about a certain field.
6. Join a startup
The last tip I want to share is what inspired me to start all these processes of self-learning and get values out of the journey.
In a startup environment, resources are very limited, with not much useable money. You’ll have to build many things from scratch.
If you can’t do that, you’ll have to find an alternative to complete the task, and that’s when you’ll start digging into different forums and groups and scheduling meetings with partners in order to get more information about where the resources are.
If you’re passionate about learning new things, a startup company is definitely one of the best places you should go and explore.
That’s a wrap
“To use, or not to use”
We all know that there are countless resources on the Internet now. However, we all have limited time and can’t go through all of them to determine which one to use and which not. Not to mention that there are many spams pretended to be “free resources” or “discounts”.
Numerous resources available means it’s harder for us to find the resources that are really helpful, especially those that are free but are hidden in lower rankings on search engine result pages.
You’ll be surprised how powerful the ads are inside Google’s search engine marketing system, and how extremely valuable resources are so low in search engine rankings. After all, not everyone who’s providing value online knows search engine optimization well.
In addition to online environments, make the most use of your connections and resources you already have! People and books are your best friends, always.
Now the good news is that you know 6 ways to experiment with to find free online resources that are valuable to you. Simply try out these proven ways and start digging into the unknown areas you’re interested in!