Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
blog.brainstation.io
Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
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Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
#2I've learned everything I know for the last 20+ years after graduating from college at my own pace. I'm sure that's true for most developers.
Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
#3I'm not sure that course completion percentage is necessarily the best metric to be drawing conclusions from. I will often sign up for MOOCs and courses for a single talk, chapter, or topic that I'm interested in with no intention of actually completing the course. I wonder I'm an outlier in this regard or if this approach is much more common than the author of this article realizes.
Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
#4There are two problems with "learn on your own" (more accurate than "own pace")
- No-one to guide you if you misunderstand a big concept. You are just left with a lot of reading around
- Time. This is why so many contractors are accused of learning on the clients time - because there is so little of your own time.
Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
#5Strongly disagree.
What you get from MOOCs is directly proportional to how seriously you approach them. Yes, MOOCs do less handholding (aka: forcing adults to behave like adults) than traditional university courses.
But they are also 100x cheaper and easier to access. If you approach them the right way you can get way more. I do still believe that for your 1st degree a traditional university is still the right choice, but there's no reason to return to university after graduation.
Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
#6I'm not sure that course completion percentage is necessarily the best metric to be drawing conclusions from. I will often sign up for MOOCs and courses for a single talk, chapter, or topic that I'm interested in with no intention of actually completing the course. I wonder I'm an outlier in this regard or if this approach is much more common than the author of this article realizes.
These are aspirational course sign ups, and are of course similar to aspirational book purchases (where I will learn a new language through psychic connection between the desk the book is on and the my hands on the desk) and aspirational gym membership (where calories will be burnt simply because my body knows it might go to the gym and so gets all worried and sweaty anyway)
Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
#7This is more like an ad for brainstation pretending to be an analysis of online learning, and it does neither well at all...
Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
#8I'm not sure that course completion percentage is necessarily the best metric to be drawing conclusions from. I will often sign up for MOOCs and courses for a single talk, chapter, or topic that I'm interested in with no intention of actually completing the course. I wonder I'm an outlier in this regard or if this approach is much more common than the author of this article realizes.
These are aspirational course sign ups, and are of course similar to aspirational book purchases (where I will learn a new language through psychic connection between the desk the book is on and the my hands on the desk) and aspirational gym membership (where calories will be burnt simply because my body knows it might go to the gym and so gets all worried and sweaty anyway)
Yea, gym membership is a good comparison, actually. I know tons of people who signed up for a gym and never went, which means we could use the same argument the article does to insinuate that "signing up for a gym on your own is an ineffective way to get fit."
Clearly there are more effective (and more expensive) ways to get fit, but some people manage on their own with a gym membership and access to /r/fitness or whatever, so it's not exactly ineffective.
Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
#9Well, the author is assuming that high grades are perfectly correlated with learning and retention - I'm not so sure that's the case. I understand why we need grades as a motivator and a metric, but they're only part of the story. I got a decent grade when I took undergraduate calculus 25 years ago, but I didn't really learn or retain much - at best, it was in my mind that if I ever needed to figure a rate of change, then I would probably have to go look up how to do derivatives. On the other hand, I recently came across my old undergraduate calculus textbook and started re-reading it just for the heck of it, working all the problems, taking as long as I damned well pleased on each one. And now I feel like I _am_ actually learning and retaining, partly because I'm not rushing to meet an artificial deadline.
Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
#10There are two problems with "learn on your own" (more accurate than "own pace") - No-one to guide you if you misunderstand a big concept. You are just left with a lot of reading around - Time. This is why so many contractors are accused of learning on the clients time - because there is so little of your own time.
> No-one to guide you if you misunderstand a big concept. You are just left with a lot of reading around.
Good MOOCs have tests to ensure that doesn't happen. This is in fact how you solve this problem in all large courses, even those taking place in actual physical universities.
> Time.
That doesn't make any sense. MOOCs require minimal time investment, and are the most flexible.
Are you saying that being forced to attend at more restrictive times would somehow increase one's time supply?