There’s never been a better time to be a lifelong student. Websites, apps, podcasts, and YouTube series’ abound for people interested in gaining new skills from pros on the cheap (or even free). But it can be incredibly overwhelming to sift through the massive amounts of educational content available literally at your fingertips.
Gibbon is trying to make this easier. Gibbon allows users to create “playlists” of content centered around a certain topic—essentially like the syllabi of your college days, made digital (and way more awesome). These easy-to-follow collections are curated lists of articles, tools, and resources from around the web that are brought together to teach you everything you need to know on a given topic. For example, the “Art of Copywriting” playlist includes links to articles from “35 Blogging Tips to Woo Readers and Win Business” to “5 Ways SEO Can Teach You About Better Copywriting.” Teachers can even add notes to each resource, explaining why they find it so valuable.
When you click on a link, it takes you to the original resource, but in a Gibbon-ified framework for clean reading that allows you to remove sidebar ads and distracting banners from many sites, helping you focus only on the learning ahead of you. You can also share or save articles to social media or navigate directly to the next piece on the playlist.
The Gibbon ecosystem, like lots of online environments today, is also gamified. There’s a counter in your menu bar that keeps track of how many minutes you’ve spent learning this week, and you can earn points and badges for exploring the different playlists and growing your knowledge in different subject areas. As a bonus, the site is beautifully designed and simple to navigate. Who wants to fiddle with confusing widgets and icons when you’re just looking to spend some time upping your skills?
Gibbon is ideal for people curious about different career paths or skill sets who are just looking to dabble or obtain baseline knowledge on their own time before investing resources in official instruction. And if you feel like there are some resources that would be helpful for people interested in your field? You can also “teach” via Gibbon by creating your own playlists.
To start learning, make a free Gibbon account, then select whichever playlists interest you—Mastering Photography, Being and Staying Productive, Building a Business Model, among the many options—and dig in. You can keep up the learning on your computer or on your iPad on the go, all for no charge.
Free school? Sign us up.