After I posted about “The World Is an Open School”, I came across a great post by Romin Irani on some valuable ways to learn while building great things on your own. To top it up, I stumbled on an amazing post by MBA grad who is a Googler now on why and how managers should try to get hands dirty to add value to organizations! I want to add two cents to it and talk a bit about some platforms where you can train yourself, compete and build stuff – and in this post specially focused on programming (But do read the two posts mentioned earlier). In general online education space is changing at a fast pace and there is a revolution underway (Another TechCrunch articles on growth of education space)

TopCoder whose slogan reads “Your solutions, born from competition” is perfect place to participate in various marathons. The categories in which you can compete is huge. To name a few areas where you can compete: Algorithms, Component Design, Software Architecture, Software development, Testing and Content creation. Tutorials, articles and demo exercises will get you started and then you can test your mettle in real battles!

CodeChef which is founded by Directi founder also employs a competition model for solving interesting problem statements where programmers all over world compete in a cut throat competition!

TeamTreeHouse focuses on practical courses such as Website development, Android development, iOS development and Ruby etc.

If you want to learn Spring, Hibernate, Maven, Struts etc from scratch with every basic concept explained well, then go no farther than JavaBrains. If you want to further dive deep into into Design Patterns, or want to learn more about Java collections etc. then Derek Banas is here to help.

There are many other similar platforms like Codecademy Allows you to to take courses and earn credits for them. Or CodeSchool and Ruby Koans.

I can definitely not list all sources, but for anyone who wants to get started, this list is a good start. We are entering the world of “democratization of education” and things will get only better!