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Help OLS to Continue Providing Free Online Education & Skills Training

Before I start this article, I want to take a moment to say one very important thing – I want to say thank you to our Community Manager, Leonie, for actually reaching out to me and providing me with feedback regarding this article. To be honest, I was initially quite apprehensive about the idea of sharing our crowdfunding campaign(s) on DesignSpark as I was concerned that I might violate certain community rules.

As it turns out, it's actually okay due to the fact that onlinelabseries is 100% non-profit. So, I am really grateful that I have the opportunity to share our crowdfunding campaigns with you.

What is onlinelabseries?

onlinelabseries (or OLS for short) is a 100% non-profit online education and skills training learning platform that was launched earlier this year. Its goal and vision are really quite simple – to provide free online education and skills training for anyone and everyone around the world.

OLS is an independent platform that does not charge brand partners any fees for featuring their products in a dedicated lab series. This allows us to remain completely independent and focus purely on the learning content.

Having personally attended a number of private courses in the past, I found they could be quite biased and even training courses arranged by some independent educational institutes are obviously funded by the manufacturer/supplier.

With OLS, we want to keep it free for everyone so that it cannot be used as a paid advertising or marketing platform. In terms of the educational content, this allows us to maintain the right and liberty to share honestly about the products we feature, as well as their strengths and limitations. Truth is, no product is perfect. I have always advocated that a really good engineer knows that there are no ‘one size fits all’ solutions. And that is also why OLS is not tied down to a particular brand, giving it the freedom to partner with brands that we believe will continue to be promising and relevant in the future.

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Finding a Way to Keep OLS Going

So, we come to the reason for the crowdfunding campaigns. OLS was born from passion and a desire to provide free education and skills training because we believe education should be an equal human right, not just a privilege for those that can afford it.

However, providing free access to all also means that OLS has absolutely no revenue, never mind profit. I set up OLS entirely out of my passion for the areas of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics). 90% of the skills I have today are completely self-taught. Frankly, I get a kick out of being able to share my knowledge and skills with others and giving people a chance to pursue an interest or passion of their own is priceless.

However, we now need to find a way to help fund the website and video hosting platform to support the fast-growing OLS community – somewhere that would allow us to host all the content and stream to multiple social media platforms all at once.

Another important area is video production equipment. Having worked in a fully equipped studio environment before, I am very familiar with the whole setup. But as a new not-for-profit organisation, we are running everything on a shoestring budget which doesn’t allow for that kind of setup.

You can help directly by contributing to our crowdfunding campaign to support OLS’ operations.

Having the Right Tools for the Job

This opportunity to share OLS’ crowdfunding campaigns on DesignSpark is a huge blessing because we can reach out to people like you who can probably relate to some degree. Many of you here are makers and engineers and you have probably worked with different sets of tools in your own profession as well.

The second crowdfunding campaign aims to raise enough money to invest in a mobile workstation that provides OLS with the ability to provide the next stage of online learning, including (but not limited to):

  1. Content Creation (Video Streaming, Photo Editing, Graphics Editing)
  2. Software Engineering
  3. Artificial Intelligence (Machine Learning)
  4. IoT, Electronics and STEAM education
  5. 3D Models and Animations (AutoCAD, EAGLE, Maya, 3DS Max and so on)
  6. Game Design and Development
  7. Data Analytics and Mining
  8. Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)

Chances are that most of you are familiar with at least some of the above areas, so you can imagine the amount of hard disk space, RAM, and Graphics Card capability needed.

OLS also plans to grow its global network of online educators to support the creation of learning content and materials as we develop. Enthusiasts, professionals, even full-time educators during the day are all welcomed to contribute as well. Connect with me at onlinelabseries.

You can help directly by contributing to our crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for an OLS mobile workstation.

Summary

In closing guys, I want to say thank you for actually taking the time to read this article. I hope that it wasn’t too lengthy.

My hope is simply that sharing this article encourages other engineers, designers and makers to contribute in making learning more accessible – not just for the next generation of engineers, but also as an invaluable source for us more established engineers to refer to!

I am the Founder & Community Leader of onlinelabseries (OLS), a learning platform & community that focuses on delivering free online education & skills training to potentially millions around the world. I started in IoT from a software development, solution architecture background. I picked up electronics in 2014 through Raspberry Pi 1 and Arduino. Currently, I am also a recognized thought-leader, practitioner & influencer in multiple fields of work.
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