Voyage of self-improvement

Sometimes in life you have to make a stop, step back from your path and watch all you have done so far to understand where are you heading, or why are you even heading that way. I guess it´s a little moment of introspection and selfdiscovery you sometimes have to dive into to set up new goals for your next steps.

Lately, due to my exile situation i kinda felt like i was letting myself fade from the general view. I was so troubled with external problems i didn´t left time enough for my self-improvement, so i decided to invest a bit in myself and my external world visibility, both personal and professional. 

Through the last weeks i discovered lots of interesting websites that caught my attention and i decided to share with whoever is in need of a bit of self-loving.

Coursera

Coursera is an online e-learning platform that allows you to partake in classes of international universities, from your home, whenever you want, free...  Yeah, not joking. It´s not everybody that has time or money to afford higher education this days so this option comes like a blessing for those like me who still want to learn something but want to do so while on pajamas at home.

An example of coursera´s course offering.

While the offer is great, I didn´t found any appealing course until some weeks ago when i enrolled in two courses that have resulted in a very engaging and interesting experience. Strategic Innovation on Organizations, from Vanderbilt University and Gamification, from the university of Pennsylvania. The professors are very knowledgeable and provide clear explanations and interesting debates, and the best point is i don´t feel like i have that pressure from taking lectures at the university. I really recommend any of you willing to learn something new to head to coursera to check out all they have to offer.

Accredible 

I found accredible through a fellow coursera colleague. Accredible is a really new platform (in fact it officially launched this week) that allows you to create online catalogues of information for the courses you have taken. The original point is to prove you actually did that course to a possible employer, but it also doubles as an efficient place to store your course notes and assignments.

An example of Accredible certificate.

The page is still new and they still have some improvements to make but they seem to be heading on the right direction.

I highly recommend you give it a try, especially to those who do online courses in platforms like coursera, as is a good place to  store online the info without the risk of getting your notes lost in your closet or HD. Highly recommended too if you want to enhance your skills visibility for possible employers.

Smarterer

Smarterer is a collaborative website that produces tests about different skills and bases the difficulty of the answers in the amount of people who managed to answer them correctly. This way provides tests that scale in difficulty with your level for a variety of skills.

An example of a Smarterer Scorecard

The point is that the test grades your level on the skill and assigns a point based value, displayed on a badge on a scorecard that you can share with others, for example, in LinkedIn (which is currently integrated) to show others what your skill level truly is instead of just have your personal word on it.

Also, highly recommended for you guys looking for a new job.

About.me

About.me is a service that offers you a simple, visual homepage where you can centralize your online presence. It can be linked to all your social media accounts, your blog, and some other nice features like your Smarterer scorecard. It´s ideal if you are looking to have a place where people can find you or your work with ease. I´ve already created my page and i plan to use it as a signature for emails and blogposts.

 -----------------------------

I hope all this pages are useful for you as they are being for me. I´ll try to post some more webs and apps that I find interesting during this voyage of self-discovery.