Ten Invaluable Free Resources For Online Degree Students

When studying online from a reputable institution, students typically have access to all the learning resources they need. These may include videos, documents, slideshows, and more to assist students with their studies. However, there is also a vast amount of free resources available online that can help students, provided they know where to look. There's no shortage of materials on the internet, from free educational content shared by universities to academic journals and peer-reviewed articles. In addition, there are plenty of sites with free courses for students who want to study but might not have the finances to do so. Check out the following invaluable resources that are available for free online.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a free resource that allows anyone to broadly search for scholarly literature. Everything from articles and theses to books, abstracts, and court opinions can be browsed. These are drawn from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities, and other websites. It also allows students to explore related works, citations, authors, and publications. Another helpful feature of Google Scholar is that it ranks documents the way researchers do, based on information such as who it was written by and how often it has been cited in other scholarly literature.

Saylor Academy

Saylor Academy is a nonprofit initiative that has been around since 2008 and provides students with free and open online courses. The site has nearly 100 full-length courses that were all created by subject matter experts. These courses are all free and can be completed by students at their own pace. In addition, some universities also accept Saylor Academy courses for college or university credit. This means students can study the free online courses at their own pace and transfer the credit to one of these institutions to further their studies after taking a comprehensive exam.

GCFGlobal.org

It is easy to take things like basic computer skills, email basic, and other digital skills for granted, but there are still many who struggle in these areas. GCFGlobal.org has been around for almost 20 years and can assist students with learning the essentials skills that they need to live and work in the 21st century. The site offers more than 300 topics, including more than 6,000 lessons and 2,000 videos and interactive games for free. So whether students want to continue their education or get it started, this site has plenty of self-paced courses to assist.

Library of Congres

The United States Library of Congress has a digital collections section with materials that are available online. These include information on American history, science and technology, geography and places, art and architecture, and much more. The information in these collections has been converted to digital format from their original manuscripts, photos, prints, drawings, audio recordings, books, videos, maps, or newspapers.

FreeFullPDF

FreeFullPDF allows users to search and download free scientific publications with ease. This powerful free search engine was created for scientific articles in PDF format and provides users with access to over 80 million free scientific publications. Users can also filter the search results by Thesis, Review, Patent, Clinical Trial, Proceedings, etc. The information that can be found through FreeFullPDF covers everything from life sciences and health sciences to physics sciences, mathematics and others.

Science.gov

Science.gov describes itself as a gateway to US government science information. It is a portal that provides free access to research and development results along with scientific and technical knowledge. These are drawn from scientific organizations across 13 federal agencies. Users can search over 60 databases and more than 2200 websites for access to 200 million pages of authoritative federal science information. Of particular interest to undergraduate and graduate students is the information from across the federal government on education and training opportunities in STEM fields.

WorldWideScience.org

WorldWideScience.org allows users to search multiple scientific resources around the world. Users can enter a query in their preferred language, which is then translated and sent to every individual database or portal that is searchable by the site. The results are then returned in relevance-ranked order and can even be translated into the user's preferred language. Fields covered by WorldWideScience.org include energy, medicine, agriculture, environment, and basic sciences. Since the search is done in real-time, the results are always as current as the databases and portals themselves.

BioMed Central

BMC is an open-access publisher with a growing portfolio of peer-reviewed journals that features discoveries from research communities in STEM fields. The journals range from broad interest titles all the way to specialist journals and cover all major subject areas within biology and medicine. These subjects include biomedicine, earth sciences, energy, philosophy, psychology, life sciences, physics, and much more.

Internet Archive Scholar

The Internet Archive also has a special "Scholar" section that allows users to search millions of research papers. It includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. In addition to the latest Open Access conference proceedings, it also has digitized copies of eighteenth-century journals, and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.

ResearchGate

ResearchGate has been around since 2008, and it is its mission to connect the world of science and make research open to all. They boast 20 million researchers in their community who are all from diverse sectors in over 190 countries. All of them use ResearchGate to connect, collaborate and share their work. In addition, users can search the site by publications, authors, or even ask questions.