Make the most of self-isolation with these free online courses

If you’re someone who likes to keep active, being stuck in self-isolation could start to send you a little mad after a while. But, the extra time at home could be a blessing in disguise and provide you with more opportunities to build your skills and learn something new.

Whether it’s a new language or developing your photography skills in preparation for your next holiday, there’s plenty of online courses available right now to keep your brain active. A whole heap of organisations are offering free trial periods — or in some cases complete courses — to help get people through the Covid-19 outbreak.

So, instead of sitting on the couch watching re-runs of your favourite television show, why not take the opportunity to finally do the things you’ve always been meaning to get around to?

Learn a language

Learning a new language is a great way to fill your time in self-isolation and help you prepare for upcoming holidays. Sites like DuoLingo offer free languages courses all year round in everything from German and French to Indonesian and Japanese.

Each lesson starts with learning basic words before building up to sentence structure and full conversations. To access, simply sign up via the website or download the free app via Google Play or the App Store. The beauty of online lessons is you can learn at your own pace.

Develop your photography skills

Whether it’s capturing photos of the grandkids or your latest holiday,  but there are courses online that could help you learn a little more about how to capture the perfect snap in preparation for your next adventure.

Photocritic is currently offering a free 12-month course, teaching everything from the basics of photography to how to set up the perfect photograph. You can sign up for the course online and from there will receive an email every couple of weeks with a new task to complete and readings to go through.

Write a book

They say everybody has a book in the, so why not use all of this extra downtime to write yours? It doesn’t have to be a best-seller, but you might surprise yourself. There are heaps of online writing courses available for free online, including the Words for Writers course which promises to help get you through that procrastination stage and put pen to paper.

Throughout the course, you’ll learn new tools to help you start writing your book with tips on how to set goals, prepare for distractions and become accountable.

Enrol in university

School and university may be long behind you, but that doesn’t mean it’s too late to study something new. To help keep people occupied during self-isolation, some of the world’s leading universities are offering a selection of courses free of charge.

At the moment, leading universities such as Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University and Yale University have a total of 450 free online courses available.

Each of the courses are published to Class Central, so you can browse through at your leisure and find one that best suits your interests. Perhaps you’re a lover of the arts and want to learn about classical music, or maybe you want to up-skill and further your accounting knowledge; whatever the case, there’s sure to be something to keep you busy.