Mounis Bin Muzafar Khan

Enhancing your skill set and making sure your skills keep on improving is one of the most important aspects of a students’ life. It helps them to create a polished resume that highlights their skills, talents, achievements and credentials. So that their potential employers get to know that they’re actively improving themselves by highlighting all the skill enhancing course certifications apart from their degree on their resume, making them more appealing candidates. 

A few online global programs like Coursera, Udemy and Edx were started with a mission to provide high quality education to everyone, everywhere around the world by having teachers and instructors from top international universities like Harvard, Caltech, Stanford University, University of Edinburgh, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and many more. 

These online platforms provide an excellent opportunity for the students to learn from the best teachers out there and improve their skill sets.  As these courses are online, practical and research based, it is a perfect time for students to enhance their skills. These courses have a time span of 4 weeks to six months with only a few hours in a week.  But not all degree programs available on these platforms are recognised in the country, however the specialization courses are a different story as they help you improve your skills.

Coursera has 82 million learners, 100+ Fortune 500 companies, and more than 6,000 campuses, businesses, and governments signed to access world-class learning—anytime, anywhere with 2000+ courses available and with more than 200 leading universities and companies to bring affordable, job-relevant online learning to individuals worldwide. Coursera offers a wide range of learning opportunities—from hands-on projects and courses to job-ready certificates and degree programs. Coursera has a mixture of accredited and non-accredited courses and also offers specializations in trending subjects. Specialization certificates provided by them help to make one's resume lucrative for attention thus improving the chance to land a job or an opportunity. 

Courses provided by them are in almost every field, like Data Management, Java and Python Programming, Art, Photography etc. A photography course for beginners taught by Michigan State University instructors will start shortly on Coursera, with a duration of six months at 4 hours a week. Providing Students with an excellent opportunity to improve their skills and earn a certificate from one of the leading universities of the world, this is a paid course. There are many more courses which are free but to learn but for the certificate validating your course you have to pay a nominal fee, most of the courses available are under $200 or Rs 14,500. Having the option to provide financial support as well Coursera truly aims to give quality education to all.

Udemy is another online learning platform that offers over 155,000 video courses on a variety of subjects, professions and talents. It’s a great place to further enhance your skill, hobby or personal interest. Udemy often offers discounts up to 90% on their courses nearly every month, making online learning affordable and available to everyone. Many of the courses available are worthwhile and can help a student develop or improve skills they already possess. Udemy has a rating system that provides insight into how beneficial courses are for the students.  And whether or not the courses students take are recognised, their resume will have an edge over rest and their potential employer will likely be impressed to see their commitment in improving their skills. Udemy offers courses in Business, IT and Software, Data Management, Web Development, Photography Web Development and many more.  A Python learning course for beginners with the fee of Rs 4000 is available with certification for just Rs 445 on Udemy with instructor “Jose Marcial Portilla” having a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from Santa Clara University.

A student “Kesav Kumar R” reviewed this course and said “As a beginner this course greatly helped me. I certainly learnt all methods in Python and I have good confidence at solving problems in python now. I will recommend this course for students who want to learn python to kickstart their programming career.”

Similarly, EDX is an online learning platform started in February 2012 by Professor Anant Agarwal from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and with help of his colleagues at MIT and Harvard University. With their University Advisory Board Comprising heads of almost every prestigious university Including Professor Brian P. Schmidt AC FAA FRS Vice-Chancellor and President, The Australian National University, 2011 Nobel Laureate Physics.  Edx provides 3000+ courses with over 110 million enrolments with 35 million users and around 160 partners with 15 thousand instructors and over 1.4 million verified course certificates issued. The courses provided consist of Architecture, Art & Culture, Biology & Life Sciences, Design, Economics & Finance, Education & Teacher Training etc allowing students to improve their skills and also improving people who work better at their jobs.

Courses from international universities have a huge impact on a student’s resume. This is because the education system in these universities is much better than what is available to us and if you get a certification from a recognised university such as MIT or Harvard, your resume’s worth will multiply tenfold. But remember it's not just the certificates that are necessary, the skills have their importance as well.

With all these online program apps available on mobiles learning has never been so easy. So, learn and enhance your skills, hobbies and earn a certificate at home from these top institutes without any extra workload and boost your personal growth.