Comment: MOOC and other forms of online learning have suddenly taken centre-stage in the last few weeks amidst the restrictions imposed by the COVID19 outbreak. With working from home suddenly becoming the norm across most countries, people are spending a lot more time online, and this has come to include time spent in formal and informal learning activites. Several platforms have recognised this and are offering some of their premium content free. I work in the L&D team of an organisation, and we have been popularising all new online content that we come across – such as free webinars, online technical meet-ups, etc. – in addition to the MOOC and e-learning platforms that we already use.

@Omer Tanyilmaz also makes a similar point in their update on this topic

Make an Update: The example I would like to discuss here is a learning tool called ‘A Neural Network Playground’ and can be found at: http://playground.tensorflow.org/

This tool teaches users how to build a neural network for machine learning and artificial intelligence. This is a technical topic with a lot of underlying mathematics. This tool focuses on the implementation of neural networks and not the theory. What makes this tool an excellent learning aid is that it abstracts out all the detail, and presents a very simple interface – the problem (data in this case) is shown on the left, the neural network is in the middle and the result (output) on the right. The user can set the various parameters of the network through very simple controls and watch the progress and output. This gives the user a very good understanding of what the various settings and parameters do and how they affect the performance of the network. Conveying this notion through theory and lectures would be far mode difficult to understand. This makes this tool much more powerful and effective than more traditional ways of conveying the same knowledge.