Free business lectures and videos

There is really so much you can learn from the net. Take this one website for example. Smallbizbee.com lists 105 business lectures and videos available for free online which, according to them, saves you thousands of dollars in business education.

The lectures and videos include those on general business - getting started, startup, entrepreneurship, strategy, business tips, marketing/advertising, small business accounting, financing, business plans and business planning, leadership, social media for business, branding, business profiles and interviews.

In learning online, your investment in the form of time and focus takes the place of the expensive fees that you have to pay if you attend similar lectures physically. Like Smallbizbee.com, I have no doubt that you can learn as much online than in the real world.

Also posted at www.libre-libro.blogspot.com.

List of Accredited Private Training Institutions

This list is dated and I don't really know what the accreditation is for. I just know that the list is stored on the website of the United Nations Public Administration Network (UNPAN) and that it enumerates private training institutions in the Philippines.

For someone looking for seminars and trainings in the Philippines, the list should be helpful as it provides the addresses, the telephone numbers, as well as the training subjects, or the type of trainings that the institutions provide.

The trainings include management training, computer training, continuing professional education, local governance, rural development programs, agricultural training, etc. Although not very specific, I'd say the subjects are quite interesting.

The list of course is as of June 30, 2001. But, I am pretty sure that many of the addresses and telephone numbers shown are still valid and useful to someone curious about seminars and trainings in the Philippines. See the list here.

Free Online Courses

The best things in life are free, or so they say. One of the beauty of the Internet is that you get access to a lot of self-help material at no cost - except of course the cost of accessing the world wide web. I searched recently for free online courses and was happy to find the following.

Free education on the Internet at http://www.free-ed.net. It has courses on information technology, business, management, economics, among others. The IT courses include Visual Basic, Web Page Authoring, MS Office, Frontpage, even Red Hat Linux. Those on business, management and economics include Business Management, Modern Marketing, Bookkeeping and Accounting.

Links to free online language courses at http://www.word2word.com. These include links to courses on just about every major language in the world including Spanish, French, German, Russian and others. I even saw Cebuano there.

Another interesting site is Josh Kaufman's Personal MBA site at http://joshkaufman.net. He describes it as an experiment in educational entrepreneurism. Its purpose is to show how to substantially increase knowledge of business on ones own time and with little cost, all without setting foot inside a classroom.

Quite interesting information from few seconds of searching. Soon, I will add to this blog a continuing list of all these free online courses.

Distance learning defined

The Open University of the University of the Philippines, in their website's FAQ, defines distance education as any of the various forms of study, wherein students and teachers are physically separated. Accordign to them, students are encouraged to have independent self-learning styles. They study in their own places of residence using specially designed learning materials. These learning packages consist of print materials, and sometimes, audio-video tapes & CD ROM.

The Open University offers undergraduate, diploma, masteral and doctoral courses, even non-formal certificate programs. These courses include "interesting" courses like Master in Public Management, Master in Information Systems, and Masters in Distance Learning. Among the certificate programs also is the Professional Teaching Certificate Program designed to give non-education graduates the 18 units of professional education courses.

For those considering, the deadline for applications for admission in the first semester for undergraduate courses was last January 30, and for matesral, doctoral and other programs, this coming February 28. For the second semester, the deadline for all courses/programs is on June 30. For more information, just visit their website.