The internet has sparked one of the largest changes to education. People have completed an entire MIT Computer Science curriculum in a span of a year. Things which would sound ridiculous a couple of decades ago are now so mainstream. But I feel that there hasn’t been much awareness about the wealth of educational content that’s out there mostly free in the internet. Though most of the resources here are written from the perspective of a computer science student, I’m sure that people with other interests will also find something engaging.

Procrastination and Good introduction

Lets start with a good xkcd comic

These websites/channels are mostly pop-sci types. They are a good source of inspiration and provide interesting questions to ponder upon. For example the YouTube channels vsause and veritasium were very influential in sustaining my curiosity in physics during school days.

Resource Topics Notes
xkcd , what-if Mixed A very popular webcomic series by Randall Munroe. “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”. His what-if series is very interesting and anyone with a curious mind will absolutely love it.
3blue1brown Math Watching these amazing visuals is such a pleasure. He has a knack for explaining math concepts in a intuitive way. His essence of linear algebra and calculus is a must watch.
Vsause Mixed The channel host Michael, is a really fascinating guy. The topics he chooses for the videos are very thought provoking. He usually picks up topics which are not so popular hence we can always learn something interesting.
Veritasium Science, Technology The content in veritasium is very similar to vsause. But veritasium episodes usually focus on a single topic rather than a montage which is the case in vsause.
Kurzgesagt Philosophy, Science, History Kurzgesagt videos are in a class of their own. Their animations are phenomenal. One of my all time favorite is “optimistic nihilism” . They got so famous that they even collaborated with UN in making a episode on Plastic Pollution
Quora Mixed I guess Quora needs a post of it’s own. It’s basically a knowledge sharing website where people can post questions and answer them. This is by far the closest we can get to the minds of some of really cool people. For example a question regarding space exploration would be answered by a former NASA astronaut or how about a question on soviet propaganda being answered by a guy who worked for it. The site becomes very addictive once you start following some top writer in your areas of interest.
Crash course Mixed I feel this channel covers the most breath of topics amongst all the resources listed here. I found the initial content by Hank and John Green (yeah, the “Fault in our Stars” guy) to be more interesting than the current ones. John Green’s lectures in big history are really good
Minute Physics Physics Short videos which concentrate mainly on physics. They go beyond the standard text book stuff and ask very interesting questions like why is the solar system flat
TED talks Mixed Keynote type talks which are mostly given by academics to popularize their work. Their talks are known for their contrarian stance.

Active Learning

The above resources are good to get started/interested to a topic but the real learning happens only when we get our hands dirty. The wiki article has good amount of information regarding this topic. This is one of the places where traditional educational systems have a leg up. Even though we can stream all the content. It’s very hard to emulate the active learning which happens at schools/universities. Clarification of doubts and peer to peer interaction are very vital . Nonetheless, if you are persistent and determined you can try these websites.

Resource Topics Notes
Khan academy Mixed Salman is literally a genius. He explains concepts really well. Given that he started this to teach his (if I’m not mistaken) cousin , his pedagogy is really great. The videos are geared towards the hows and whys. Super helpful when you have no clue what the teacher is saying at school or when you want to get a intro to a topic.
Brilliant.org Predominantly math but also physics Brilliant has a good collections of wiki pages for a lot of math topics. Their problem collection is also quite good.
Art of Problem solving Math It’s more focussed towards olympiad type of math problems. Well known for it’s active discussion forums.
Project Euler Math Good resource if you’re interested in number theory and want to get better at programming
Codeforces Programming, Problem solving, algorithms The most active competetive programming community as of now (2018). Has really good problems with varied difficulties. Their contests are a
codingbat Programming One of the best ways to learn a programming language. They have a lot of beginner friendly programming puzzles with the focus of getting better at java and python.
codechef Programming Similar to codeforces . The long contest which they host every month for 10 days is one of the best ways to push yourself to learn new concepts. The joy of solving a really hard problem after days of hard work is unparalleled.
reddit Mixed Discussions are an integral part of the active learning framework and reddit is perhaps the largest forum on the planet. Since users have the option to remain anonymous, sometimes the discussions get little out of hand!

The Big Guns

Internet has probably created an education system which is highly scalable and cheap , the massive open online courses (MOOCs) . A lot of prestigious institution such as Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Caltech already have many interesting courses without the loss of any rigor. But as with any medium , there are a cases where the quality of teaching is sub par . So do lookout for reviews in sites such as class-central , mooc-list to get a better idea of the courses before enrolling.

Resource Notes
Coursera Coursera was pivotal in the success of MOOCs . Most of the courses are of top quality and the faculty members actively participate in the discussion forums.
EdX Very similar to Coursera . But has more variety and skill based courses.
MIT OCW A lot of popular courses in MIT are recorded and along with their lecture notes, assignments and solutions are made available for free online.
Stanford Lagunita It’s basically a EdX platform with courses from Stanford.
NPTEL Indian version of Coursera. This site offers courses from IITs , IISc and other prestigious institutes from India. It follows a semester pattern of classes. Courses usually span 3 to 4 months and

One of the courses which I really liked was the Algorithms course from Princeton by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne. The exposition and the assignments have totally The course authors have put in immense efforts into the course. The assignments, tests, automatic grading systems were all top notch. In fact Kevin Wayne himself used to answer a lot of queries in the forums. But this doesn’t mean that it would be a cakewalk either. The only thing you’ll have to have is the motivation and the perseverance to work through the course. This course has definitely increased my regard for what it means to take a great course

I would like to emphasis that MOOCs have their own share of disadvantages. Some MOOCs are very shallow in their curriculum. Hence even after completing the course, we don’t get a in depth understanding of the subject. One could easily get intimidated by the sheer amount of content available. Hence it’s better to start with a single course and see how it goes about.