I have previously written about Alison online training. Per the post, I did not much care for the platform because I felt that the courses there were simply repackaged material from elsewhere. I am not certain that the new that Harvard University has released their photography course on Alison changes my mind about the platform.

My reservation is that like the other course I found on Alison, the Harvard University course will just be repackaged set of lectures. Not something tailored for Alison itself. I could be completely wrong and just picked the wrong courses to sample when I was trying out Alison. I mean, I found at least one course on Udemy, which is my preferred online learning platform, that was an unedited repackage of what appeared to be a one day course on Unity. If I didn't know that the vast majority of Udemy courses are created natively for Udemy, I would get the wrong impression of the platform as a whole.

However, the reason I am not keen to give Alison a second chance is that I am already doing an "The Art of Photography" course through Open2Study, which is an Australian website offering courses through the Open Universities of Australia. They have a mix of free and paid courses. The paid courses lead to recognised accreditations. I am not as interested as official accreditation. So I am doing the month long free short course. I am enjoying it, and I also feel more connected with fellow students because of the Google Plus community.

As for why I am not interested in getting official accreditation. There is the question if photography accreditation is worth paying for given that the industry is in decline. But mostly I am not looking to do photography professionally. I am more on the series hobbyist side of the spectrum. I am happy to take photos for my own amusement, shoot friends and family or personalised photo gifts, perhaps a few paid jobs through platforms like Airtasker, although a quick look at Airtasker clearly shows that photography is a field awash with professionals, nothing more than that.