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Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
41–50 of 185 posts
Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
#42I'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.
When you have a project, you learn by necessity. When you are taking a course to expand your abilities, you learn voluntarily. I find learning via projects is the fastest and most useful. I am unsure if I will take courses ever again.
I never learn voluntarily. Anything I learn is either for my current job, or the next job I’m looking to get - whether I am actively looking or not.
For instance, I’m not going to learn the intricacies of Rust to scratch an itch if I see that there are no jobs for it.
Does that make me mercenary and show a lack of “passion”? Probably.
Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
#43For "learn at your own pace" trainings, the key to ensuring people take the entire thing and do the labs is to make each training "course" very small and consumable in a short period of time. Have it focus on a specific thing someone would want to do within the domain of the greater problem. This lets people pick and choose which isolated topics (can have pre-req's) they need to take and because they can learn the task quickly they have a high rate of completion.
Creating mountains for people to climb isn't always the best approach. By creating a series of small foothills, learners can pick and choose which tasks they need experience on and I believe this also leads to better skill retention.
Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
#44I'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.
Great point, courses are way too long. If a course could be completed in a day you'd have high completion rates.
For me, it's the length of individual videos that matter.
I prefer those with 4-7 minutes minutes per video. I've noticed that many long videos can be much shorter with minimal editing to remove unnecessary pauses, uhmms...
Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
#45Georgia Tech's OMSCS program addresses these issues very well in my experience (I'm finishing my 3rd and final year). Assignments and exams follow strict schedules, student collaboration is very strong (via Piazza, Slack, Google Hangouts), each student receives a grade, and the cost is cheap but not trivial (i.e. there is a financial incentive to make the most of the class.) I am very happy with the program and feel it should serve as a model for other institutions who want to offer MOOC like degree programs.
Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
#46I am highly skeptical of the research that shows low attendance causes poor grades. I attended 2/24 lectures for one subject, and I got the highest grade for the year, out of both semesters. And I have friends who don’t attend lectures often and do similar.
We focus on assignments - programming & software engineering assignments eat far too much time to get top marks and still attend classes. When I finish assignments, I binge watch lectures and write notes like a madman.
But yeah, I really doubt the attendance studies.
Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
#47For "learn at your own pace" trainings, the key to ensuring people take the entire thing and do the labs is to make each training "course" very small and consumable in a short period of time. Have it focus on a specific thing someone would want to do within the domain of the greater problem. This lets people pick and choose which isolated topics (can have pre-req's) they need to take and because they can learn the ta…
I couldn’t agree more - I’ve made most progress in MOOCs whenever there is a set of relatively small but valuable, achievable goals. And I’m pretty sure the MOOCs I ran out of time for required big chunks of work.
Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
#48This seems to leave out a large contributing factor, cost. Many, many of the MOOCs I’ve ever done were free or a nominal cost ($5-20). When you’re attending a class at a university or even a local community college you’ve put in a lot of initial work to just get into the class (applying, transcripts, student portal straight out of 1977 that makes MSDOS look pretty) compounded that at minimum you’re paying $300 for a…
> student portal straight out of 1977
I remember when signing up for classes at my uni circa 2002, the easiest way was to call into the scheduling system. The man speaking to you from the automated system was a professor who had died years earlier.
So I'll one-up your old student portal by saying that to sign up for classes at my university, I had to communicate with the dead. :)
Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
#49I am highly skeptical of the research that shows low attendance causes poor grades. I attended 2/24 lectures for one subject, and I got the highest grade for the year, out of both semesters. And I have friends who don’t attend lectures often and do similar. We focus on assignments - programming & software engineering assignments eat far too much time to get top marks and still attend classes. When I finish assignment…
I recognize that this is just anecdote v. anecdote, but from TA-ing a number of college courses I have found the correlation between attendance and grades to be extremely strong. There are undoubtedly exceptions such as yourself and your friends- interestingly I myself was such an exception as an undergrad- but in general students with better attendance seem to get better grades.
_That said_, I suspect that this effect is almost entirely attributable to lurking variables such as discipline and interest. A lot of students with poor attendance are either students with poor work habits, or ones don't care about the course. Both of those tend to produce poor grades. The study cited addressed study habits, and maybe touched on interest a little, but It's hard for me to say exactly how well they adjusted for those since it's paywalled.
Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
#50Strongly 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…
> Yes, MOOCs do less handholding (aka: forcing adults to behave like adults) than traditional university courses. It's interesting how much this varies globally. In the UK I had zero hand-holding for my undergraduate degree. In the last two years of high school there would be constant reminders that this would be coming. You'd turn up to lectures, occasionally have coursework that at most counted for 30% of the overa…
Yes, the university life portrayed in American tv shows is also quite unfamiliar to Nordics.
Your experience mirrors mine in Finland. You could enrol for a course and only turn up for the exams. No one cared whether you attended the lectures or the exercise sessions, you were simply expected to be able to apply the material by the end of the course.
However it depended heavily on faculty or even field. I think the humanists had to attend many of their lectures, while the exact sciences didn't have such requirements (although the physics department also insisted on handing in exercises; profs probably got tired of grading people trying their luck).
I felt I was lucky for the freedom I was granted, although I too felt I would have liked more face to face teaching for some courses (it also allowed for making poor decisions regarding priorities, though I have no regrets).
I think other students had the same sentiments, and difficult courses began having more free-form sessions in addition to lectures and exercises. I feel this is a pretty good compromise of sorts, as it allows for different styles of learning, and you could even hold a day job while studying, or live out of city etc. as you're not forced to be physically present.