Learn to code, go to university and feed the hungry, with online resources

Newcomer on the e-learning block, Codecademy, aims to make the often tedious process of learning computer coding interactive and fun.

Like many e-learning resources, Codecademy rewards online achievements with badges and encourages users to share their progress updates with friends via social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

According to TechCrunch, the Codecademy web app  went live recently and garnered more than 200,000 users during its first 72 hours — statistics that show there is a huge demand for free, fun and functional online learning.

The World Food Program is pushing the concept of online learning one step further with an innovative eLearning resource called FreeRice. FreeRice is a non-profit website run by the United Nations World Food Program that improves users’ math, geography, grammar, vocabulary, chemistry, and foreign language abilities while also rewarding users by donating rice to people living in third world countries.

If you thought the selection of online learning activities was limited and too basic, you might want to think again. Nonprofit organisation TED has been propagating profoundly thought-provoking ideas through its free, online talks featuring some of the greatest minds in the world for years and not-for-profit educational organisation, the Khan Academy, was set up by MIT graduate Salman Khan to help people around the globe learn everything from arithmetic to brain teasers to finance.

The Khan Academy features more than 2400 free video tutorials. To date it has delivered more than 71 million lessons to people around the globe. Some of the best universities in the world now offer free online courses to anyone on the web including MIT, Yale, the University of Washington, Berkeley, Harvard, UCLA and Standford.

Open Culture provides a fairly comprehensive list of free online education resources across a multitude of subjects (as well as links to free textbooks). Video sharing site YouTube also boasts a whole category dedicated to online learning videos which can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/education