The Rapid Elearning Blog

free resources

Free resources always come in handy when building courses or slide presentations. At most of my workshops we take a few minutes to share different free resources people use. It’s a great way to be reminded of resources you may have already bookmarked but have forgotten. And of course, there’s always something new to learn from others when the share what they use.

At this point, I find that there’s not a lot of new free resources being added. So I compiled the resources and put them in some sense of order to make it a bit easier to parse. I can’t vouch for all of the sites but from what I can tell, they’re all legit.

Most of the resources are free. And with all things free, be sure to check on the usage terms and give proper attribution. Here’s a post on how to did this: how to use free assets in commercial projects.

Where to Get Help from the Community

Where to Get Free Resources from Your Organization

  • Marketing team: they usually have graphics and other collateral
  • Web team: collection of online resources
  • Public relations: public facing graphics

Create Your Own & Share

  • Take your own pictures of people and share
  • Walk around organization and get background and ambient images
  • Get inspiration from stock photo sites and try to mimic them

Free Resources: Icons

Placeholder Content

Free Stock Photos

Free Medical Images

Free Illustrations

Free Templates

Free Audio

Free Fonts

Free Video

Deal Sites

These sites aren’t free but they often offer great deals. For example, I’ve been able to get a lifetime membership to a graphics site for $49 and picked up a bunch of cutout people images for just a few dollars. It’s worth subscribing to these types of sites just to see what deals come your way. Most of the deals are not relevant to elearning but you can just delete those emails.

If there’s a free resource or site you like to use, feel free to post in the comments. Spammers will be deleted.

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.

Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs

Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills

Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.

Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.

Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.



6 responses to “Hundreds of Free Resources to Build Your E-learning Courses”

Hey Tom, thanks for the organised lists, so handy!

I also use Libre Stock: http://librestock.com/
They “search the best 47 free stock photo websites in one place” and claim to offer “58,172 high quality do-what-ever-you-want stock photos, learn more.”

Of course I always check usage terms for each individual photo, but so far I have found it super useful and legit.

Thanks Tom! This is perfect!

September 28th, 2016

@Veronica: Good tip. Adding it to the list.

Hi Tom,

Thank you, Tom! Very helpful resource of resources!

Is there a website that is the source of those “neuter” characters (they look a bit like the old Gumby cartoon character, except they are white and Gumby was green)? It seems that many websites have some of them, so it would be helpful to have access to the website or company that creates them. Also, is there a name for those types of characters?

Thank you,

John

Thanks Tom.
I am new person, on creating learning content.
This help me alot.

October 24th, 2016

@John: a lot of stock sites will have those characters. Do a search for 3D characters.