By Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.
How are your online software skills? If you are uncomfortable with the most commonly required software programs — MS-Word, Excel, Adobe Acrobat, Powerpoint, PhotoShop, Corel Draw, and Dreamweaver — your academic progress may hit a brick wall, especially if you are required to create projects, write reports, and collaborate with fellow students. In addition, you'll definitely need to be able to download and use the plug-ins you'll need in order to do quizzes, view videos, listen to audio, download content, upload files, and fill out interactive forms and surveys.
You may even find that if you aren't able to use some shareware such as the audio editing program, Audacity, and can't use iMovie or Windows Moviemaker to edit films to upload and share, you may not be able to meet the requirements of some more interactive courses, such as communications.
How can you get those skills? While it is true that many community colleges and technical centers offer face-to-face courses, it's often difficult to find the time to take the courses, and they may even be rather expensive.
Fortunately, there are many courses and tutorials available for free that allow individuals to obtain training on the software programs they need.
Many of the more basic tutorials on commonly-used programs are free. More complex tutorials, higher-level skills, and more complex programs often require a learner to pay a modest monthly fee to obtain access to the courses. In either case, the fact that such programs are available is a huge relief for many. Granted, the quality varies, and many are not designed as well as they could be, and are not ideal for all learning styles, since some are simply demos that do not allow interaction or practice while taking the training. However, the key to making sure you've learned something is to try it out in real life. The training tutorials — even if boring — can be made more engaging if you take the time to stop for a moment and practice what you've learned.
Here is a brief list of some of the best sources on the web for free and low-cost online software training.
Atomic Learning Training Videos
http://movies.atomiclearning.com/k12/freetrial/
Tutorials -
http://movies.atomiclearning.com/k12/tutorials
Access / Acrobat / Appleworks, etc.
Learnthat.com
http://www.learnthat.com/
Excel 2007
Vista
Macromedia 2004 MX Flash
http://www.learnthat.com/computers/learn-1774-free_flash_mx_2004_training_tutorial.htm
VTC Online University
http://apex.vtc.com/welcome.php
Free demos and online: http://apex.vtc.com/demo.php
Movie title tutorials: http://apex.vtc.com/alltitles.php
Lynda.com
http://lynda.com/
Learning @ Your Own Pace
http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modListing.asp#titleListing
Online Tutorial Library
http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/index.asp
U. S. Small Business Association
Free Online Training
http://www.sba.gov/services/training/index.html
http://www.sba.gov/services/training/onlinecourses/index.html
Courses in English
http://www.sba.gov/services/training/index.html
Courses in Spanish
http://www.sba.gov/espanol/Biblioteca_en_Linea/
Computer Training Courses
http://www.trainingcenter.com/
Computer Courses List
http://www.trainingcenter.com/signup/signup.asp
DevShed
http://www.devshed.com/
Open Source Web Development Tutorials
E-Seminars
http://www.eseminarslive.com/
GCF LearnFree.org
http://www.gcflearnfree.org/
InfoPackets
http://www.infopackets.com/windowstutorials.htm