Extending the Halls of Learning Beyond Campus Boundaries

Nestled in the mountain town of Cullowhee, Western Carolina University (WCU) is the westernmost school in the University of North Carolina system. From the residence hall to the science lab, the school is extending digital workspace solutions to all corners of the campus and beyond.

WCU was the first campus in the University of North Carolina system to require its students to bring a computer to school, and today its 10,800 students show up with a variety of devices, from desktop and laptop computers to tablets and smartphones. The university needed a way to provide each student with consistent and easy-to-access resources, no matter what kind of device they have or whether they’re on or off campus.

The university chose to do so by implementing a secure cloud-based digital workspace solution from VMware that enables students to use a single sign-on to access all their apps, from Microsoft Office 365 to specialized academic apps. “The fact that we can consistently and conveniently offer all of this software is a huge benefit to our community,” says Mark Ellersick, technology support analyst at WCU.

Apps are distributed with VMware App Volumes, which customizes desktops based on student profiles. When a student finishes a class, their access to apps for that class is withdrawn—saving money for WCU’s IT department. At the same time, VMware Horizon provides non-persistent virtual desktops for students.

These digital workspace solutions and mobility have allowed WCU to expand its distance education programs. “VMware has provided the EUC stack that’s helped us to level the playing field between our on-campus students and those distance education students,” says Patrick McGraw, virtualization and tier-one engineer at WCU. Instead of having to install their own software, distance education students can participate in the same programs as on-campus students, as long as they have an Internet connection.

Students on campus benefit as well. “The great thing about the technology is that students don’t notice it,” Ellersick says. “They walk into a lab, log in, and do their work. When they walk out of that lab and go home, or even to another town or state, they can access that same resource. Now the lab is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”

Enterprise-level security at many levels protects university data. For example, students in medical fields and employees of the university health service use non-persistent desktops to access patient information, keeping it in the data center instead of the endpoint. Ellersick cites multifactor authentication as an additional security factor that’s important when the university processes other types of sensitive information, such as credit card transactions.

Moreover, software deployment is now much easier for WCU. Before virtualization, to get school computers ready for a new year the IT team would “re-image computers for hours and hours … two weeks straight, 24 hours a day,” McGraw recalls. “If a faculty member forgot to request a piece of software on lab computers, we would have to re-image the entire classroom, and that would take a week or more.” With App Volumes, new apps are available instantly for an entire class. “The faculty doesn’t lose class periods waiting for applications to get installed. It’s really sped up the process.”

Digital workspace technologies are enhancing the university’s mission of education for all. “We’re excited, as a university and as an IT department, to give students a consistent experience and really level the playing field,” Ellersick says. “We’re breaking down barriers and making resources more accessible. We’re excited that we can bring everything together in a very intuitive and easy-to-use package.”

Watch the video to learn more about how WCU simplifies student access to apps.

The Possibility Report is an ongoing series about how technology is changing our understanding of the world around us. This article is part of LEARN, our discussion on how emerging technologies promise to change the educational experience as we know it, from elementary schools to prisons and everywhere between.

The Best Online Learning Platforms for 2024

Online learning sites enable us to expand our minds and creative spirit. No matter where you are in the world or how little prior experience you have with a subject, you can learn just about anything, so long as you have an internet connection. We test and review dozens of online learning platforms, and here we list the best ones for all kinds of non-matriculated learning.

"Learning" isn't limited to the education taught in school. There are sites where you can pick up new software skills, become a better manager, study the art of memoir writing, watch a tutorial on how to set up a sewing machine, and listen to a world-renowned master in their field explain how they got there. Are you looking for practical skills? Business skills? Professional development? Inspiration? Or are you a student who needs tutoring in AP History? You can learn any of these things and more.

Read on for the top services we've tested, followed by everything you need to know about online learning.

Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks

Everything about MasterClass deserves an A+. Instructors are among the top names in their fields. Each class is designed in painstaking detail. The production quality is superb. And what you learn from MasterClass is a combination of practical skill and inspiration.

MasterClass is for anyone who has a curiosity and desire to learn, from teenagers on up. It's for people who want insight into a chosen field, as well as those open to learning what they can from the highest achievers in other fields. Whether you're passionate about standup comedy, filmmaking, leadership, baking, music, or scholarship, you can find wonderful insight from MasterClass.

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Khan Academy is one of the best online learning sources because it clearly and strategically helps you learn academic subjects for free. Whether you need to master a mathematical concept or advance your understanding of macroeconomics, Khan has you covered. The videos, readings, and interactive components it uses to teach are well thought out and delivered with care.

Khan Academy focuses on learning materials for students in kindergarten through early college. That doesn't mean other people can't use it or find immense value in it. When you look at the available courses, however, you will notice that many of them closely map to the US education system. So for example, there are courses under the heading High School Physics. Khan Academy is especially adept at teaching math, science, computing, economics, history, and personal finance, among a few other subjects. You get sequential material, too, so you can work through one lesson at a time in order until you've learned what you need to know.

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Coursera is different from many other online learning sites because it hosts real courses from prestigious universities and makes many of them available for free. In other words, you can get all the lectures (recorded to video) and reading materials from a class at, say, Yale University without paying anything at all. Coursera has other kinds of classes, too, but the university material is really what sets it apart. For some courses, there are options to pay for it and earn a professional certificate, bachelor's degree, or master's degree. If you don't pay, you still get the exact same learning materials, but you don't get any interaction with instructors or any grades on your assignments.

Coursera is for people who want access to real university classes and have the self-discipline to follow through on all the assignments, which can often take weeks or months to complete. You mostly learn through videos, readings, quizzes, and assignments. If you use Coursera for free, you may be able to get feedback on your assignments from other learners, but not the instructor. Coursera is best for learners who can handle college-level course material.

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We picked Kahoot! as one of the best online learning platforms because it lets you create games, quizzes, and other interactive content for your learning materials. Whether you are designing games and quizzes or playing them, Kahoot! is easy to use. We love that it adds engagement to all kinds of get-togethers, whether in the classroom, meeting room, or living room.

Kahoot! is an ideal platform for businesses that need to teach something, as well as educational instructors who want to make their content more engaging. Once you have an account, you'll see other fun ways to use the platform to create, for example, trivia for family gatherings or activities at conferences

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Skillshare's videos teach you skills to lead a creative life. It covers everything from creative hobbies to tips for running a creative online business. This site offers short videos, sometimes as part of a much longer series, where you learn and practice mostly hands-on skills. You get additional materials, such as PDF handouts, and sometimes community forums where you can upload examples of your work to get feedback from other learners. While its pricing has jumped around over the years, Skillshare now has a reasonable annual cost.

Skillshare is for people who want to develop creative skills or need help learning the ins and outs of running a creative business. It's especially good at helping people with drawing, painting, digital arts, photography, cooking, writing, sewing, and other crafts. One aspect of Skillshare that we appreciate is that it does have some very short courses or lessons within courses that you can complete as a one-off. For example, if you just want to practice drawing cacti for five minutes, Skillshare has videos that will indulge your creative cravings.

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We picked Udacity as one of the best online learning platforms because it teaches highly specific, job-focused skills and gives learners an opportunity to create sample work to prove it. Udacity delivers rigorous courses, called Nanodegrees, that teach highly specific job-related skills, mostly in the tech arena. Some of the Nanodegrees have been created in partnership with big-name companies, like IBM Watson and Google. Learners come away not only with new skills but also—fairly often—sample projects to show their work, perhaps for a job interview.

Udacity is clearly for job seekers who want to work in a specific technical field and perhaps for a specific employer. How specific? There's a course called Self-Driving Car Engineer, developed in partnership with Mercedes-Benz, Nvidia, Uber, and other companies. Udacity does offer some more general business courses on topics such as marketing. That said, Udacity is best for people who are willing to pay a few hundred dollars per month to complete one of its highly targeted Nanodegrees.

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Wondrium is a subscription-based video streaming service that focuses on educational programming. Wondrium was formerly called The Great Courses Plus, and while it has expanded its catalog in recent years, it still has everything that The Great Courses Plus had. The courses come across as a series of TV lectures or simple documentaries. You can watch video courses not only on your computer, but also via Apple TV, Roku, and other devices. The service has an overwhelming amount of content on topics such as philosophy, religion, and the natural world.

The best way to describe Wondrium is to call it couch-side edutainment. It's not geared toward teaching you hands-on skills or helping you achieve a specific learning goal (though it does have some skills-focused classes). Instead, Wondrium feeds your curiosity with videos that explore ideas that perhaps you know nothing about. In that sense, it's wonderful for beginners or people who don't have any prior knowledge of the subjects it covers.

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We included Udemy in this list of the best online learning platforms because it sells discrete video courses on an array of topics. Many people end up using Udemy because they met an instructor through another context, and the instructor pointed them to Udemy to purchase their course. Generally speaking, Udemy's content covers both personal and professional development, with excellent lessons in management training, software use, and programming. We like that you can pay for Udemy courses one by one, with prices varying per course, or you can get access to a catalog of content with a business subscription. Regrettably, the subscription prices are high, and you need a minimum of five people for a business account.

Udemy is for three kinds of people: 1) those with a business subscription to the site who can simply explore what it has to offer, 2) people who are interested in a specific course offered on the site, and 3) instructors who want to host and sell their courses on Udemy. For the third use case, we didn't do detailed testing or analysis, instead focusing on Udemy from the learner's perspective.

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Buying Guide: The Best Online Learning Platforms for 2024

All the sites included in this roundup use video as the primary teaching method. Some add interactive quizzes, PDFs, links to additional resources, and discussion areas (usually little more than a section for comments) so that everyone engaged with the material can learn from one another.

Videos can be standalone, although usually, they're part of a series. A course might contain several hours of videos, but they're always broken up into parts. The best learning sites take care to plan out how much content goes into each video as well as the sequence of videos. In this way, your learning is cumulative. You're typically building new ideas or concepts on top of what you've already learned.

When quizzes are available, they can be private to you or shared with an administrator or instructor if your login is part of a business account or associated with a formal class or tutoring (in the case of Khan Academy). They help you track how well you've retained new information. Some sites offer certificates upon completion. They are not widely accepted by other institutions, but they may be helpful to you in some cases. For example, if your employer pays for you to have a subscription to a learning website, you can offer these certificates as evidence of using it.

A note on language learning: There are so many excellent websites and apps for learning a foreign language that we have a separate article for them. When you want a language app, you'll have specific questions, such as: Which one offers the language I want? How much time do I need to spend on it each day? How much does it cost? You might also want to know which apps are better for developing a base vocabulary versus advancing existing skills. Our roundup of the best language learning apps and websites covers all these points and more.

Similarly, PCMag has a separate article on the best courses for learning to create websites. It's another concrete skill that comes with specific questions. We have another entire article dedicated to the best online courses for Photoshop.

(Credit: MasterClass/PCMag)

MasterClass is an on-demand learning website where you get hours and hours of video featuring top talent talking about their fields. Everything about it is extremely well made, and if you're interested in even one course, we think it's worth paying for a year's subscription. You will certainly find other courses if interested once you get into the catalog.

MasterClass is simultaneously binge-worthy, educational, and thought-provoking. The quality alone leaves you whispering, "How is this so good?"

In the recent past, MasterClass has done a good job of improving its lineup of instructors to include more top talent who are people of color and women (it was previously weak in this regard). The catalog of classes is growing all the time. The content is top rate, and the quality is exceptional.

Coursera is one of the best online learning sites that offers plenty of free video courses and materials. It also partners with universities to make some of their degree programs available online. If you want the degree, you have to apply to the program and pay tuition to the school, just as if you were an in-person student. However, if you don't care about getting the degree and you just want access to real courses and materials from the likes of Yale, University of Singapore, and Sciences Po in France, then you can create a free Coursera account and have access to them.

No matter how you attend, you get video lectures, reading materials, quizzes, and in some cases the opportunity to submit assignments for peer-review (when you audit a course) or grades (with paid enrollment).

(Credit: Coursera/PCMag)

Coursera partners with private companies, too, to offer accessible education in a variety of fields from programming to designing with AutoCAD. Other examples of classes you can take include Introduction to Food and Health, Google IT Automation with Python, and Introduction to International Criminal Law.

If you need to learn specific job skills, there are two online sites that we recommend. One is Udacity because it teaches highly specific, job-focused skills. If you are aiming to get a job from one of the companies that Udacity partners with, the Udacity courses could give you a leg up. While Udacity offers a handful of courses that aren't technical in nature, the majority are, and they are highly specific. How specific? There's a course called Self-Driving Car Engineer, developed in partnership with Mercedes-Benz, Nvidia, Uber, and other companies.

The other site is LinkedIn Learning. We like it best for brushing up on general job skills, such as public speaking and developing interviewing strategies; we also love its video tutorials on learning creative software, such as Photoshop. Many of those software programs come from Lynda.com, which was acquired by LinkedIn some years ago. Lynda.com was the best resource for learning software for many years, and we're happy it lives on today at LinkedIn.

(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)

The next time you feel like you need some fresh ideas, take a spin through one of these sites and learn something new. You might find yourself caught up in wonderment at new and interesting ideas or taking notes on something useful. The beauty of online learning sites is that they don't require any commitment, so you can learn what you want at your own pace.

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