E-learning thrives and abounds on the internet. You can pay for courses such as webinars. Or, if you don't want to pay, you can search out free training courses on the internet, and as long as you are a discerning person, get what you want.I purchase online courses from Poynter's News University training centre for a news team I supervise. They are quite good and if you take them live you can pose questions to the instructor. Some pay sites also offer free courses. Poynter, for example, offers quite a few free training sessions for budding journos at newsu.org.For courses in other areas, I suggest you start at YouTube (www.youtube.com). If you want to learn Photoshop, which is tough to get right, there are hundreds of free tutorials on YouTube or at online publications on graphics. For a laugh, search YouTube for Deke McClelland's incredible rendition of 101 Photoshop tips in five minutes.Some top universities have created their own YouTube sections, such as Berkeley and Yale. Berkeley University of California has online lectures ranging from electrical engineering to computer science. To navigate, use the ‘playlists' section to see the topics and the enormous amount of individual lectures under each.While Berkeley is heavily into technology and the sciences, Yale University leans toward the arts. You can take a whole series of lectures on ancient Greek history or literature theory, if you want.Other major universities have done the same. You can find a great listing at openculture.com under the ‘courses' section. The site lists all the formats available by topic rather than by university, which is very helpful.Even if you are not interested in taking introductory computing or history courses you might get stuck at the site checking out links to movies and books for your various devices.Another place to go is iTunes, which has a budding library of courses on podcasts. I have watched a whole series on introductory astronomy on my iPod, which Open Culture strangely does not list.Another approach is being taken by Peer 2 Peer University (www.p2pu.org), a site that I hope continues to thrive. P2PU bills itself as the ‘School of Webcraft', though it says the site will consider any course suggestions offered by budding instructors, including “penguin breeding/surfing/shark diving/ethical philosophy/crayon making”.Currently, Peer 2 Peer University has courses for those who want to get deep into building internet sites and is heavy on scripting languages such as PHP. The course write-up on PHP is quite professionally done, and the course instructor has detailed exactly when you have to attend the chat sessions and what reading is required. That course took in 80 people.All courses are free and based on resources openly available on the web. As the site states anyone can volunteer to run a course. Launched two years ago with five people, there are now about 1,000 volunteers running courses in semesters. The next round begins in April and you can sign up any time since not all the courses in the current semester were filled up by the end of January.So get some learning in your spare time; even though online courses in their various forms can't beat spending time in a classroom, they can be a way to continue your education. For those about to enter university, they are a chance to taste what you're considering before you take the whole menu.Microsoft's Hotmail was my first online e-mail account but after a while it was the first one I dropped in favour of keeping Yahoo and Google. Lately, Hotmail came up with the weird announcement that it would allow anyone to create multiple e-mail accounts that “can be read, replied to, and managed from their everyday email inbox”. I thought I already did that through Yahoo and Google, and can forward my e-mail to my main one, if I want.At Hotmail the additional e-mail addresses “can be had in the same manner as signing up for new accounts, but they require no extra log-ins or upkeep”. OK, so signing into one signs you in to all, which is an advantage. But Google began offering that feature in August.The difference with Hotmail is you can now have aliases within the same account, I guess. Each user can create up to five aliases, any of which can be deleted and replaced with another at any time. The press are calling these “disposable accounts”. I only mention this because if you are not managing any of your mass of e-mails with multiple accounts, you must be drowning by now.Send any comments to elamin.ahmed@gmail.com