It used to be that being a couch potato was almost universally deemed a negative—but it’s funny how it only takes a contagious epidemic to turn the normal state of things on its head. Fortunately, nobody with a computer need be without ways to occupy their  time.

Publishers, studios, and other media agencies are providing free offerings to give people plenty to do to ride out the corona lockdowns—as well as tools to assist self-education or learning at home. Here are a few of them I’ve noticed.

Educational/children’s book publisher Scholastic is offering a free 20-day learn-at-home program for grades K-9 via its web site—very handy for those in areas whose schools have closed down.

Would your children like to learn more about whales? Seattle-based research institute Oceans Initiative has launched a free Virtual Marine Biology Camp to teach school-closed children more about aquatic life. They’re holding live sessions every Monday and Thursday at 11 a.m. Pacific (2 p.m. Eastern) to help give those out-of-school children something educational to do.

Audiobook publisher and Amazon subsidiary Audible.com is making hundreds of audiobook titles available for free for the duration of school closures, via stories.audible.com.

NPR, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, and CNET, among others, have articles collecting a lot of other free entertainment and education sources that weren’t free before the Corona quarantines. (Indeed, all you need do is google “coronavirus free entertainment” to find all the others who had the same idea.) But there are also still plenty of things that were already free and still are.

Baen’s Free Library is, of course, still just as free as it ever was. If you’re a member of a compatible public library, Hoopla Digital will let you borrow a limited number of ebooks, audiobooks, albums, movies, or TV episodes per month for free. And you still have access to Project Gutenberg, Librivox for audiobooks, Archive.org for all sorts of content, and all the other public-domain sites out there.

Online academic database JSTOR has over 6,000 ebooks and 150 journals that are available to the general public, and could also help to fill the education gap with schools closed down.

If you’re looking for something interesting to watch, Open Culture has links to over 200 free documentary films online, on subjects as diverse as Hayao Miyazaki and M.C. Escher. The site also includes links to free ebooks, audiobooks, online courses, and textbooks.

If you’re into anime, most of Crunchyroll‘s anime titles are available to watch for free (save for the very newest episode). Resolution may be limited, and you may have to put up with advertisements—but free is free, right? Pluto TV has over 250 channels of free video content, too, with mobile apps for iOS and Android available. And YouTube has its usual countless hundreds of thousands of hours of enjoyable ways to entertain or improve yourself, including its “Learning” category.

If you’re more into computer games, you could check out the Homecoming City of Heroes servers. Coming up on a full year since the game originally returned, it has thousands of players once again enjoying life in the early-2000s superhero MMO. (I play primarily on the Torchbearer shard, myself, and am always happy to help out new or returning players.)

There are many more free education or entertainment resources than I could even list, and there will doubtless be more the longer this lockdown goes on. How about adding your favorites in the comments?

Photo by Eric Antunes on Pexels.com

If you found this post worth reading and want to kick in a buck or two to the author, click here.