Image curtesy of Hillary on Flickr
In the fall of 2015, the Pew Research Center asked 2,752 Americans if they considered themselves “lifelong learners”. Seventy-three percent answered in the affirmative, however most had never heard of distance learning, Khan academy, or massive open online courses. If you are in that majority, distance learning refers to courses in which the students and teachers are not physically in the same place and therefore communicate through forums, websites and video calls, Kahn academy is a free website which offers a game-like interface for learning everything you might encounter in grade school, and massive open online courses are free websites which host video lectures, readings and homework assignments and are usually based on a university course. The Pew Survey did not ask participants if they were aware that as of 2014, 95% of public libraries allow members to check out ebooks , so you can check out a book on the history of France from your local public library when you are in France.
Technology promising to “transform education” has come along before, and it doesn’t look as though any of the tools mentioned above will make a bigger difference in undergrad test scores than their predecessors. However, the internet does offer a lot to students learning on their own. It is harder to study self-taught learners than students in a classroom since when you are your own teacher you set your own goals and don’t always stick to a plan from the beginning of the semester. I think that the number of students signing up for distance education courses proves that these resources are helping people who don’t have a better option. The online masters in computer science offered by the University of Georgia is not free and has only existed for four years, but had 4,515 students sign up last spring.
If you would like to use some of these tools to teach yourself a new carrier, new skills for your current job, or a hobby, you might be wondering what the best way to go about integrating them into your life is. I can’t claim to have all the answers to that question, but as someone who has studied free online educational courses for the past few years, I can give you some tips from what I have learned.
The first thing to keep in mind is that learning is not a spectator sport. Doing exercises makes a big difference in learning what you don’t know. The overconfidence effect is well documented in psychology. In 1960, Pauline and Joe Adams examined the difference between the fraction of difficult words participants spelled correctly and their estimate of that fraction prior to hearing the correct answers. They found that on average participants thought they correctly spelled 26% more words than they actually did and 40% of participants thought they got every word right.
Getting regular feedback on what you don’t know can help you see what you still need to learn and set reasonable short term goals for your learning. In 2013, a meta-analysis of studies which looked at the effect of introducing discussions, small quizzes and other forms of feedback into the classroom found that these methods were so effective it can no longer be considered ethical to teach without them. The benefits of doing exercises relative to watching lectures outside of a traditional classroom has not been as thoroughly studied, but a 2015 study of students taking a free online course found that students who signed up to do extra exercises on a separate system did 9 points better on the final than those who only watched videos and did in video quizzes.
The obvious downside of doing lots of exercises is the amount of time and effort they take up, which brings me to my second tip: you have much less time than you think you do. Of students who sign up for free online courses, 50% will not do anything in the course other than clicking the signup button. Sixty three percent will never watch a single video. Eighty four percent will never complete any part of the assignments. These statistics make the fact that 45% of students who get at least one point will also pass the course look good by comparison (all statistics are based on my own analysis of Vanderbilt Coursera courses).
If you want to have more interaction with a course than just deleting email reminders, there are two types of time management which work. The first is clearing your schedule for the weekend and doing a whole course in 24 hours. In the short-term you might actually have as much time as you think you do. This method works best if there is something you want to brush up on or expose yourself to which doesn’t involve much memorization. For instance, if you’d like a taste of neural networks playing with Tensor Flow for a weekend will give you that, but you won’t be able to remember all the architectures you read about next month.
The other method is making the amount you do each day tiny enough that it fits into your busy schedule. The speed of learning with this method is slow and don’t plan on doing it with a bunch of courses at once, but it works better if you have more long-term goals. For instance, if you’d like to learn a new programming language, cramming all your learning into a few days will overwhelm you with syntax. Doing one short exercise per day will give you time to get accustomed to surface differences. If you use this method, make sure that you enjoy studying. You are not going to keep doing something every day which you don’t enjoy.
In either case, remember not to get discouraged. We tend to compare our current learning speed to ourselves in grade school or college. The thing to keep in mind is that you learned quickly in those days because learning was your only job. It’s a lot easier to keep up with class work when you don’t have to worry about a job, bills and kids.
My third tip is about gaming the system. If you are looking for a cheat code to keep yourself motivated, it is called friends. You should be careful with this cheat code though, as it has a tendency to backfire. Learning with friends has been shown to have a lot of benefits. People who sign up for an online course with a friend are less likely to drop out than those who take courses on their own. Discussing problems with peers in the classroom has been shown to improve quiz performance. This effect is so powerful that even promising students a more influential role on the discussion forums has been found to increase the effort they put into assignments.
The dark side of learning with friends is that it can reset your priorities to an unhealthy degree. Humans are social animals and a lot of us really hate confrontation. I have had students at Vanderbilt tell me they don’t come to office hours because they would rather risk failing a course they are paying $200 a lecture for than let their boss and co-workers down by canceling a minimum wage shift last minute. In college, I attended Frisbee tournaments the weekend before the final project for a class was due, because I felt more compelled not to let my teammates down than not fail my classes. Do not let your study group take over your life, and remember that just because you are motivated to read a book doesn’t mean you have the time to read it.
Finally, I would advise anyone reading this to reflect on how many resources the participants in the Pew Survey were unaware of. Just like them, there are probably a lot of good resources for learning you are missing out on. So far, the best place I’ve seen to learn about great resources is Reddit. If you can find a sub-reddit for the thing you want to learn the chances that it has a thread describing the resources that are out there is good. If you think a massive open online course is most likely the best format for you to learn, there is a website called Mooc-List which hosts a database of MOOCs from various providers. If you are finishing a course and wondering what your next step should be, the forums of online courses are a great place to reach out to people who may know (this is particularly true if more experienced learners may be coming back to practice, as happens with flashcard applications).
An important thing to keep in mind when looking for learning resources is that tools can make as big a difference as learning materials. If you are learning a programming language the right IDE will make your life much easier. Good note taking tools and review practices can make all the difference in a variety of subjects. If you are learning about graphs or networks, knowing which tools will let you visualize example graphs the fastest can really help. If you are learning a natural language, plugins which let you look up words faster will decrease your frustration levels when reading passages, and as mentioned above, keeping learning enjoyable is crucial to the success of long term learning. Of course, if you are a programmer, don’t be afraid to make your own tools if you think of a way to help yourself.
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I hope these tips help you learn whatever it is that you are passionate about.
