Today we are sharing with you some web tools to help you grow professionally. These are probably the best you can ever find online. Check out the list below and share with us your suggestions and additions. This is a work in progress. Enjoy
1. Free eBooks and Audiobooks
To grow professionally you definitely need to invest time and effort in learning new skills and competencies besides enriching your the knowledge base of your content area with new insights and state of the art research. EBooks and audiobooks are key in this regard. You can search for materials related to your field of interest and read or listen to them at your pace and wherever you want.
Audiobooks offer the added convenience of being accessible even in situations where a print or digital ebook is not. For instance, you can listen to your audiobooks while working out, running, driving, walking in the park, etc. Some good platforms that offer free ebooks and audiobooks include: Internet Archive, LibriVox, Open Library, Open Culture, Bookbub, and many more.
2. Social and professional networking
Collective intelligence is important to your professional growth. Through creating professional connections for instance by attending conferences, webinars, workshops, etc, you get to tap into the expertise and knowledge of your crowd allowing you to access insider insights that would be hard to access otherwise.
The web is teeming with social and professional platforms where you can network with other professionals in your field most important of these platforms are Twitter, LinkedIn, and Researchgate.
3. Free and premium online courses
Gone are the days when you need to go through a whole process in order to access paywalled knowledge. The Internet has made it super easy to self-educate. There are now numerous platforms that offer quality online courses covering any topic or content area. Some of these courses are available through renowned universities and in certain cases they offer recognized certifications. Among these platforms are :EdX, Coursera, Udemy, Khan Academy, Class Central, OpenYale Courses, Open MIT Courseware, MasterClass, among others.
4. Digital curation tools
Digital curation has become an important skill for the 21st century learner. The sheer volume of data and information you come across online is overwhelming to say the least. To make the best of your online surfing you need to master the skill of curation, that is, be able to bookmark important resources and digital content and organize it in ways that make it easy for you to access it later on. Some good digital curation tools to consider in this regard include Flipboard, Pocket, Evernote Web Clipper, Instapaper, Raindrop, among others.
5. Open access journals and scholarly literature
Part of your professional development journey is to keep updated about the state of the art research and studies in your field and one way to do it is through access to peer reviewed academic journals. Unfortunately scholarly literature is not always free and if you are not associated with an institution you will need to pay to access it.
However, several of the academic platforms do offer open access resources and research papers. Some of these platforms include: Eric, SpringerOpen, Elsevier, SAGE Open, JSTOR, ScienceOpen, Digital Library of the Commons, Directory of Open Access Journals, and many more.
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