……What’s Holding You Back?
It’s neither intelligence nor technique that holds people back from being successful self-taught learners, says Bach. It’s insecurity. “Feelings of inadequacy stop curiosity,” he says. In Bach’s own field of competitive thinkers, he’s learned that “most people who have ambition have a terrible fear that although they’re good, they’re not good enough or smart enough. It’s debilitating.” It ties back to the notion of cultivating a growth mindset; people with such a mindset don’t worry about how smart they are. What matters is their openness toward developing their skills and talents…..
More here – Psychology Today
Over the last year or so I have used Edx and Coursera mainly for Programming and machine learning. They have courses on all sorts of subjects and you can do most of them for free unless you are gagging for a certificate. Even then they are only around $60 to $100 a module. I like Kahn Academy too but I prefer having some set tasks that need marking (I know I know who would have thought that was a good idea?)
What I particularly like is that the courses seem to cater for differing levels of ability. As an example I started learning Data science with a Andrew Ngs Harvard course but found the algebra and matrix arithmetic a little too stiff to pick up so I switched to a data analytics course at MIT and learned the same subjects (albeit in R instead of Octave) in a different way. Similarly I tried a few Python courses before I found one that suited me.
The only caveat I can think of for this type of learning is that, for these to be worthwhile, you have to be able to push your comfort levels. You are often set assignments that go beyond the lectures and you have to scour around the internet and read lots of books to get a decent grade