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Most of the time, you don’t really need another MOOC

eugeneyan.com

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Re: Most of the time, you don’t really need another MOOC

#11

Post by zanny »

I've picked up drawing in the last few years, probably because it occupies enough overlap with the centers of my brain I trained to code but also is outside the envelope enough to still feel like something different from my day job.

Its basically the same thing there too. Honestly you need both structured learning and lived experience in both, and probably in most skills in life. If you don't have the structure you will meander aimlessly solving "problems" and "getting better" (at code or art) but never actually getting anywhere with it. If you only have the structure you will never be able to actually make anything truly new because you can't solve the novel problems in the trenches.

Start something new with structure but rapidly push yourself to start using that regimented curriculum to make new stuff. And then when you enter a new problem domain (you learned Python and want to start doing networking or you know how to draw but want to paint) you switch back to a regimented curriculum to start till you get that 20% baseline knowledge to build off of again.

Re: Most of the time, you don’t really need another MOOC

#12

Post by angarg12 »

Many years ago I used to be very proactive about my learning. I read tons of books, did MOOCs, tutorials, learnt new tools and frameworks...

What I found with time is that I forgot most of those. Except for the very basic and foundational concepts, anything that I haven't kept practicing is almost gone. I can't even remember most of the courses or books I've read.

Even worse, in some cases I ended up actually using that cool tool that I learnt 3 years ago. Guess what, now it is 2 major versions ahead and most of what I knew is useless anyway.

I love the reference to JIT learning in the article. This has been my primary way of learning for the past few years: wait until I'm facing a problem, and then put the effort to learn enough to solve it.

I still do some background explorative learning, but JIT is much more efficient and effective.

Re: Most of the time, you don’t really need another MOOC

#13

Post by elaus »

Gys wrote: post #7

MOOC in case you were wondering like me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course

I wish articles would at least explain acronyms the first time they're mentioned. Just putting the full form in parenthesis would go a long way and not disturb readers that already know them.

Maybe it's because I'm not a native speaker, but I have never heard of MOOCs before – and I'm consuming a lot of content in English on a daily basis (e.g. on HN).

Re: Most of the time, you don’t really need another MOOC

#15

Post by robbyking »

angarg12 wrote: post #12

Many years ago I used to be very proactive about my learning. I read tons of books, did MOOCs, tutorials, learnt new tools and frameworks... What I found with time is that I forgot most of those. Except for the very basic and foundational concepts, anything that I haven't kept practicing is almost gone. I can't even remember most of the courses or books I've read. Even worse, in some cases I ended up actually using t…

> Anything that I haven't kept practicing is almost gone.

I think that's true of any method of learning. I once took a class on a proprietary audio visual language, and a year of so later my manager asked me to write some control software using that language, and I basically had to start from scratch.

On the other hand, I took Stanford's first MOOC Swift Class, and have been using Swift as my primary language ever since.

Re: Most of the time, you don’t really need another MOOC

#17

Post by elliekelly »

angarg12 wrote: post #12

Many years ago I used to be very proactive about my learning. I read tons of books, did MOOCs, tutorials, learnt new tools and frameworks... What I found with time is that I forgot most of those. Except for the very basic and foundational concepts, anything that I haven't kept practicing is almost gone. I can't even remember most of the courses or books I've read. Even worse, in some cases I ended up actually using t…

> anything that I haven't kept practicing is almost gone. I can't even remember most of the courses or books I've read.

I don’t think this is unique to MOOCs. I think this is a fact of life.

Re: Most of the time, you don’t really need another MOOC

#18

Post by MauranKilom »

Gys wrote: post #7

MOOC in case you were wondering like me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course

Plea for future article writers: It won't kill you to hyperlink the first occurrence of acronyms (especially titular ones) in the block text. Those ten seconds will not only save hundreds of readers time (even if they only mouse over the link to see the expansion in the Wikipedia page title). It will also prevent readers opening your article, seeing the same unexplained acronym mentioned every second sentence and deciding that a google search with an unknown amount of "figuring out which of all the results matches the article context" is not worth their time.
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