Many companies have responded to the coronavirus pandemic by offering free resources to students. These resources range from things to help you learn, or connect with friends. We compiled a list of some of our favorite deals.
Discord
Discord, a popular messaging and voice chat app recently opened up their Go Live service up to 50 people for free.
Go Live allows users to share their screen, so that you can give presentations and collaborate in real time. It doesn’t feature video chat, but the voice chat works well enough, and unlike Zoom it doesn’t have a 40-minute time out for the free tier.
Discord offers both a Mac and Windows app. The service worked well when we tried it. The connection was also more stable over bad internet connections than Zoom, likely because of the lack of a video chat feature. It does lack the ability to call into a meeting though, so it requires access to the internet to use.
Discord is also a great way to keep together with friends. We started a Discord server for The Alabamian, and it allows us to have a main general channel and an off-topic channel so that the random conversation that helped us enjoy our time together can still flourish.
Codecademy
Codecademy opened up their pro subscription for free for 90 days to students with a .edu address.
The website offers online courses in computer and data science, with courses ranging from computer science, web development and statistical programs, like R. Their pro tier walks you through how to create programs and use programing to better understand data.
Also, on the company’s pro tier, you get access to walkthroughs for various projects that you can build with computer programing. I’ve been using the site to try to make myself a better website and make my resume more competitive.
While, it’s not necessarily the first thing you’d think of doing during a crisis it may help take your mind off the current situation because, at least for me, computer programing forces my brain to think in a totally different way.
Spectrum Internet
Spectrum has offered 60 days of free internet access to households with Pre-K through college students to anyone who has a student living in their household and hasn’t subscribed to Spectrum in the last 30 days. If you recently moved to somewhere that doesn’t have internet access this offer may help connect you to your classes and friends.
Amazon Kindle Unlimited
In response to Coronavirus, Amazon made their popular Kindle unlimited service free for new and existing users for two months. The service has over a million books that are available to read.
Minimoog Model D
This one’s out there, but Moog recently made their iOS app which models their famous Minimoog model D synthesizer free. Even if you have never had an interest in creating music or in synthesizers, I highly recommend checking it out, because it is a lot of fun.
The app allows you to play around with all of the modifiers and filters you’d find on the actual synth, while running really well on any iOS device.
Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University press opened up its massive online library of college level textbooks, journal articles and book chapters until the end of May.
The University’s website recently went down due to the massive volume, but it’s back up now. So, if you were sharing a textbook with someone and can’t anymore, I’d check here before having one shipped to you. Or, if you need some extra reading or a source for a paper you’re writing, there are a ton of great resources available.
HBO
The company behind “The Sapranos”, “Veep” and “Game of Thrones” is offering hundreds of hours of their Emmy award winning television shows for free during the month of April.
It’s not everything in their library, notably “Game of Thrones” isn’t on the list of free content, but you’ll find “The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part”, “Barry” and various other shows and movies on the list of the company’s free offering.
Waid Jones was the editor-in-chief of The Alabamian during the 2019–2020 academic year. In 2018, while managing editor of The Alabamian, he received the Veterans of Influence Rising Star Award from the Birmingham Business Journal. Prior to coming to UM he was in the U.S. Marine Corps for two and a half years. Jones graduated with a degree in political science from UM in 2020. He is currently the news editor for the Jackson County Sentinel in Scottsboro, Alabama.
