How to stay home and learn

Transparent language courses - If you thought learning a language could only be done sitting in a classroom (read sweltering classroom), welcome to Transparent.com. There's more than 120 languages to choose from, some of you may have never even heard of — take Wolof for example. Or Asturian, Xhosa, Inuktitut or Nauatl. There's the more mundane Bengali, French and Urdu also on offer. www.transparent.com

MIT Open Courseware- Welcome to the virtual Ivy League. Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers its course material as part of its Open Courseware initiative for over 2000 courses spread over 50 disciplines, including courses from the Sloan School of Management. Yale, Stanford and Harvard are also joining the revolution. It's free, it 's prestigious and it's available in the comfort of your own home. ocw.mit.edu

Poynter News University - Bloggers, freelancers, journalists and anyone who wants to write better can join courses from one of the most prestigious organisations in the business. Netizens will welcome tips on how to use social media to your advantage, with courses like Advanced Twitter for Journalism. www.newsu.org

The Gutenberg project: Now for some free 'unstructured' learning. Started by Michael Hart in 1997, it has more than 33,000 e-books for free download. Another 100,000 free e-publications are available through its partners. Popular titles include Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.

www.gutenberg.org

Compiled by Pankaj Mullick