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Where do you usually look for courses?
As my school project this year, I'm making a metasearch engine for courses (any type, online/offline, free/paid). I could just add the websites I know myself but school requires us to provide a detailed explanation of how we did "market research", so I'm asking here.
What websites do you usually go to first to when you want to learn something? It should preferably be something which is not exclusive to IT, but those websites are fine as well if they're really good.
It really depends on what I'm trying to learn, but the first place I usually look is YouTube. And I've watch a fair amount of lecture series there over the years. E.g. Via MIT OpenCourseWare, YaleCourses, Crash Course.
And those three also have their own dedicated websites too:
https://ocw.mit.edu/, https://oyc.yale.edu/, https://thecrashcourse.com
But I've also gone through various free and paid full courses at Khan Academy, Coursera, Pluralsight (formerly Digital-Tutors.com), and LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com).
Typically I don't look for courses. I look for the raw information via web searches. For things that are complex or very much outside of my wheelhouse, I look instead for books about the subject. For instance, earlier this year I wanted to do some fermentation so I read through The Art of Fermentation so I could understand more about how it works and what the pitfalls and best practices are (for those interested, it basically takes care of itself so there's no single right answer; just ask people what they do and it'll probably work out). For books I generally look around communities that focus on the subject at hand and see if they have any recommendations; it's a good way to get books that are both easy to understand and reasonably accurate.
But when it comes to courses specifically, I don't really have an answer because it's been such a mixed bag. The best courses I have voluntarily taken have been the ones I've paid for - college courses. I've taken exactly one online course that I even thought was good, but in retrospect it was fairly surface-level information dump kind of content. Free online courses tend to be useless to me simply because they don't seem to be very well organized, so it's very difficult for me to get into. The only free online courses I ever got much out of was Apple's Develop in Swift courses, which were delivered as simple ebooks alongside some code samples.
It depends what I want to learn, but I don't usually start with college websites. Usually I find a relevant local organization (could be some cultural org, or a crafts guild), and poking around their website. One of the big things I look for in online courses is the option to ask the teacher questions and not just watch a lecture.
I can't really name specific sites because "courses" is really broad.
I usually search for pdf documents on university websites (usually just "topic related query filetype:pdf"). I have discovered a lot of great notes (such as those of James Aspnes, these on lock free programming). I also search specific sites devoted to topics (e.g. maths stackexchange).
Otherwise I look at sites such as jstor.org or use https://search.marginalia.nu/