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So You’ve Decided to Learn Something New Online — Now What?
A strategy for actually getting through that course you just signed up for
While a pandemic is not a sabbatical, your time in isolation can be a unique opportunity to learn something new or improve your skills. But if you’re one of the many people currently trying out online education (Coursera is seeing a 300% increase in students right now compared to this time last year), you’ll quickly realize it’s not quite like regular school. With an online class, it’s easy to get distracted (no one will scold you if you decide to text your friends or stream a Netflix show while watching a lecture), there’s little or no face-to-face interaction with teachers and fellow learners, and keeping up with the material requires a great amount of self-discipline that not everyone has. One study reports that, on average, only 15% of students complete the online classes they start.
In other words, it’s not enough to simply sign up for a class and wait to be enlightened. Here are three things that can help you not only finish the course, but continue to use what you’ve learned long after the final lecture.
Create a hands-on project
Research by Jo Boaler, a professor of education at Stanford University, has shown that students who learned math by doing projects performed better on tests than those who simply listened to lectures, read textbooks, and participated in other traditional methods of instruction. Hands-on projects are a great form of active learning — the act of “shipping” your work can help you discover valuable insights in a fast, on-the-job sort of way.
If the course you’re taking doesn’t already have a project you’re excited about built into its syllabus, create your own. Choose something meaningful to you, and then set a clear start and end date, as deadlines can help keep you on schedule. (As the author Robert Caro, who writes three pages a day, has said: “Without some kind of quota, I think you’re fooling yourself.”) If you’re learning how to write, for example, you might commit to writing a 15-page mini-book on a topic of your choice within the span of a month. You could spend five days doing research, outline your book for the next five days, write a page a day…
