We all know that Mount Holyoke College provides a lot of resources and support for their students. But you might not have known about all the online resources that Mount Holyoke also provides for free. It took me over two years to find them, so I decided to list some of them out to save you the time:
1) Rosetta Stone
Mount Holyoke gives students free access to language learning softwares Mango Languages, Skritter, and, probably the most famous one, Rosetta Stone. These programs are offered through the Language Resource Center on campus in order to encourage learning in and out of the classroom. Mango Languages focuses on oratory skills and offers over 25 languages, Skritter is specifically for Chinese and Japanese characters, and Rosetta Stone uses interactive software to help with speaking and word recognition.
2) Lynda.com
Lynda.com is a website where you can take classes to learn business skills, both technical and social. The courses are taught through pre-recorded videos, so you can go at your own pace and there is no obligation to finish a course in a certain time frame. There are also multiple courses that focus on programming and graphic design. It is a good resource if you want to learn more applied and directly used skills for the job world.
3) Streaming Movies on Kanopy
LITS actually provides a couple of audio and image streaming services. The one that I want to highlight is a service called Kanopy Streaming Service. Kanopy streams over 26,000 films to over 3,000 higher education campuses worldwide, including Moho. They have a variety of films from documentaries to blockbusters to indie films. To give you a sense of the range of movies on Kanopy, here are some of the films I saw on the website today: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Nosferatu, The Bicycle Thief, and the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night.
4) Big Interview
Along with the many workshops and handouts the Career Development Center provides, it also gives us access to an online resource called Big Interview, which helps develop interview skills. There are video tutorials similar to Lynda.com, but also a more interactive aspect. You are given example interview questions and encouraged to film yourself answering questions, which gives you a chance to consider your body language along with the content of your answer. You can also have the videos of yourself looked at by instructors from Big Interview.
5) Virtual Computing Lab
Mount Holyoke manages the lab in conjunction with the other Five-College institutions. The virtual computing lab gives you access to multiple softwares for free, including Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, SPSS, Dreamweaver, and more. You do not have to install anything on your computer and you can access the lab any time of the day on a Mac or PC.
Take advantage of these resources now. I did not know about Kanopy until a month ago and now I have two years of free movies to catch up on (and also professional development stuff).
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