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“Learning How to Learn,” the most popular course on Coursera
- loco5niner 9y agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14936265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14936265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15084059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15084059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15068785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15068785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14930203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14930203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14928598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14928598
- melling 9y agozero comments. We do get a lot of resubmissions but if there wasn’t a previous discussion, we just wasted our time clicking those links.
- sremani 9y agoQuite an awesome course. I highly recommend it. In a day and age, we feel outdated by minute, sets right perspective and gives a good system for knowledge worker of any domain.
- maxwellfoley 9y agoIs this any good? I've had it in my list of things to check out for a while but I suspect it might just be TED-talk pop-psych voodoo stuff.
- dmalvarado 9y agoNo, it's really good. They back up their statements with neuroscience research and give you practical implementation tips.
- davidgrenier 9y agoThis is a zero-bullshit course. I completed it in about a week an a half (definitely not a lot of work) and it's drastically changed the way I look at learning and my perspective about the difficulty of earning new skills. My pace on reading programming books for instance has gone down such that it takes about 2-3 times it would normally take to go through the material, however the difference is unmistakable with respect to how much I know the material. It took me 2-3 years of additional work experience to be at a comparable level in other topics.
- b_emery 9y agoSo you read through the books more slowly, practicing, and recalling the material? Can you elaborate on your process now?
- davidgrenier 9y agoI work several subjects in parallel (three books currently). I go through each chapter twice. Once to understand the material then moving on to another book. When I come back to the former book I go through the chapter again creating Anki cards for anything notable. The sheer amount of material I notice I had completely forgotten on the second reading is astounding. I go through the Anki cards daily, in the morning I cover the material created from two of my books. In the evening I go through the third book (which I deem more valuable in a deep sense/abstract). I have yet to have solid a strategy on chunk-building (as the course pushes you to do), however I can still see some bigger units emerge with time.
- b_emery 9y agoThanks very much
- jamestimmins 9y agoCan you elaborate on why it's valuable to go through different books in parallel? My goal has always been to do one thing at a time, so the idea that the opposite if beneficial is interesting.
- throwaway4569 9y agoIt was alright in the sense that I went through it passively (didn't do the assignments, just watched the videos). They put a great perspective on how we learn which summarized to spaced repetition, taking in subjects as chunks, and some time management techniques(like the pomodoro).
- Jemmeh 9y agoIt's great. They also link to a lot of additional optional reading to backup what they're talking about and much of that is also very useful.
- neves 9y agoIt is excellent. Technics I've taken years to collect are grouped and organized in just one place. Go for it. I'd put more emphasis in topics like SRS, but maybe it is a matter of taste.
- fgandiya 9y agosp527 covered it pretty well, but it's a really good class. While you could just read the instructor's book, A Mind for Numbers, this does a good job with the motivational aspect. It even comes with interviews from some successful scientists on the tips they use.
- aeorgnoieang 9y agoThe very first sentence: > The studio for what is arguably the world’s most successful online course is tucked into a corner of Barb and Phil Oakley’s basement, a converted TV room that smells faintly of cat urine. I feel embarrassed on the Oakley's behalf. But I'm not a cat owner so maybe a room in one's home smelling (however faintly) of cat urine isn't particularly embarrassing. Am I unreasonable in thinking that the author is an asshole?
- pavanred 9y agoTo me that sentence reads as a factual description devoid of judgement. EDIT: I am surprised so many feel strongly about this and it didn't strike to me as insensitive at all. Just makes me realize that being sensitive to others is quite hard, specially while writing for platforms with such diverse set of users. How would one know? :)
- mamon 9y agoIt might be factual, but the mention of cat urine smell is unnecessary and rude.
- stinkytaco 9y agoYou're right, but it's a totally irrelevant fact that other people will still judge on.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- i_cant_speel 9y agoWould it be okay to point out that he's fat if he was overweight? Pointing out a negative fact unrelated to the topic like this is a rude thing to do.
- droidist2 9y ago"Hey, it's true" but it doesn't really add any useful information, it's just mean.
- baron816 9y agoCrashCourse has a study skills course: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtNcAJRf3bE1IJU6nMfHj86W https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtNcAJRf3bE1... It's geared more toward a younger crowd, but it's still pretty good, at least so far.
- fgandiya 9y agoThe guy hosting that course (Tom Frank) runs a really good blog, collegeinfogeek.com which despite being college focused has great motivational/discipline tips.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sp527 9y agoTook the course. A lot of it is cruft and motivation for the underlying core ideas. The techniques suggested are things many people are already familiar with: recall, deliberate practice, interleaving, spaced repetition, Einstellung, Pomodoro, Feynman Method, Cornell notes or similar (to force recall), exercise regularly, sleep well, focus on concepts not facts (chunking), etc. A composite of these dramatically enhances the learning process. I can post some of the notes I took on the course if anyone is genuinely curious. The key premise of the course is that the brute force approach people usually take to learning is highly inefficient and ultimately ineffective (you'll forget). EDIT: Notes https://pastebin.com/JNbGxvpQ https://pastebin.com/JNbGxvpQ
- appearsonline 9y agoI would appreciate the notes. :)
- rpeden 9y ago"A Mind for Numbers" is basically the book version of this course (same author). I found it quite good, and I personally found it faster and easier to learn the concepts in book form than on Coursera.
- vira28 9y agoambivalents posted above. https://workflowy.com/s/E9HW.jGUYboLrGj https://workflowy.com/s/E9HW.jGUYboLrGj
- ishansharma 9y agoWould be great if you could post the notes. I'm definitely interested. :)
- pfranz 9y agoI thought similarly, but still think it was worth it. A big reason I took it was because I had been meaning to read her book. My wife and I have thought about the topic of learning probably more than the average person. She has been using Anki for years to help with foreign language study. She admits she didn't figure out how to study until college and most of it was self learned try-and-fail. We see others in our family who spend hours blankly staring at materials, but still do poorly. I feel like learning should be taught in schools. Not sure if high school is too premature or if it should be a college freshman course.
- tonyhb 9y agoDr Oakley also wrote "A Mind for Numbers", which is essentially this course in text form. The book is great as a a basis for the theory of learning, and dives into the same content (diffuse vs focused thinking, skimming chapters before reading etc.). I find having a text reference with dedicated time makes me learn more, so if you're interested in the course you'd probably also love the book.
- johnvonneumann 9y agoGot this at home, bought it whilst doing the course a couple of years ago, I've been planning to get around to reading it, I'm gonna bump it up to my next up after I'm finished with "It".
- ukyrgf 9y agoAh! I bought this book and loved it, but couldn't remember how on earth it got recommended to me. Now I recall reading up on this course and deciding to try the book instead (video courses tend to waste too much time saying what you're about to learn, barely expanding on it, and then reviewing what you just learned).
- Scarbutt 9y agoFor those who read her book and did the course, is there anything in the course that isn't covered by the book? what's the advantage of the course over the book? As a side note, I have found that the most powerful technique for me is recalling.
- fgandiya 9y agoIf you just wanted the information, you could stick with the book since it goes into greater depth about the learning method. The one thing I really like about the course were the interviews where the interviewees (such as Cal Newport and the 1 year MIT degree guy) went into great depth on their focus methods. I also liked the assignments since the scorers gave helpful feedback although I don't know what it's like now with the changes coursera has gone through since I took this class.
- sn9 9y agoThe main advantage of the course is that it's free.
- fullmoon 9y agoWhich of her books are you referring to?
- Scarbutt 9y agoA mind for numbers.
- shahahmed 9y agoGreat summary on the course from reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/GetMotivated/comments/5950tm/text_i_just_finished_the_online_coursera_course/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GetMotivated/comments/5950tm/text_i...
- jkscm 9y agoThis is a pretty good summary of the core concepts: http://www.math.toronto.edu/nhoell/10rules-of-studying.pdf http://www.math.toronto.edu/nhoell/10rules-of-studying.pdf
- abhip 9y agoI took the course as well and wrote a post about applying the lessons learned as a developer: https://medium.com/learn-love-code/learnings-from-learning-how-to-learn-19d149920dc4 https://medium.com/learn-love-code/learnings-from-learning-h... Feedback welcome! Would love to learn what other techniques devs use to learn and level up
- hkon 9y agoI love to learn how to learn. Using what I learnt to learn stuff is hard, so I don't do it.
- baby 9y agoI haven't followed a course on Coursera since the first iteration of Crypto I. I heard that it became really bad, asking you to pay for a lot of courses.
- leggomylibro 9y agoYou heard right, it is really bad. REALLY bad. They don't even audit the courses they sell to see if they work. I've seen blatantly missing material, completely bricked dev environments, assignments with rubrics that don't match up with their grading criteria, repositories with several errors in code marked, 'DO NOT EDIT', the list goes on. Rough stuff. Look elsewhere for online courses. Coursera is all about pushing sales, not learning.
- ImaCake 9y agoI find Udemy is a lot better. The courses have been rated by other people so you can usually figure out if it's worth the effort to spend $15 on it.
- Al-Khwarizmi 9y agoI suppose it depends on the course. I have really fond memories of the "Chinese for Beginners" and "More Chinese for Beginners" courses from Peking university I took on Coursera. They managed to engage me, I really enjoyed the teaching style and I learned a lot in relation to the time spent, it was probably the most efficient Chinese learning method I've taken. Then I went into a course in edX and the website was way better, the platform was miles ahead, the forums were better, the video player was amazing with the ability to change video speed and add subtitles, etc... but I dropped out in like two weeks! Now this post has motivated me to look again in Coursera and there are two specializations for Chinese that didn't exist before, one from Peking University (with different teachers to the one I remember) and another from Shanghai Jiao Tong... I'm going to choose one and give it a try :)
- jamestimmins 9y agoI'd counter this mindset by saying that OF COURSE they ask you to pay. In my experience they've provided extremely high quality educational material, and even while paying its a fantastic deal. I especially liked the algorithms course by Tim Roughgarden. It's one thing to say that their lectures are objectively bad, but quite another to argue that asking for payment in return for a service is itself a bad thing. I personally have benefited quite a bit from Coursera and Udacity, and now see paying for courses as the best way that I can make sure others are able to benefit as well.
- roceasta 9y agoFantastic that resources like this now exist. In some ways it seems to be reminding us about how we used to learn. Children spontaneously go back again and again to things that delight them (spaced repetition) and they switch activities when bored (Pomodoro). Unfortunately, perhaps as a result of schooling, or other hard knocks, the spontaneous impulse gets lost. Adults suffer from mixed motivations and seem to be fairly clueless about what they find genuinely interesting. It becomes difficult to approach topics playfully.
- sp527 9y agoAdults are forced to be much more pragmatic and less volatile. Plus, most of us suffer from time scarcity. There's a specific pivot point in life wherein you shift from primarily a learner to primarily a producer and I think the shift in how we approach knowledge and our own interests is the unfortunate baggage of that transition.
- HateInAPuddle 9y agoAm I the only one who thinks this is a cynical ploy to tap into the anxieties people have about not being successful?
- tchaffee 9y agoI took the course. I love learning and have been learning new things for decades and thought my techniques were pretty good. I'm a very fast learner. The course helped me more than I was expecting and my learning speed and ability to memorize noticeably improved. Especially with the foreign language I'm studying. And the theories around how the brain works were interesting. You're probably being a little cynical. ;-)
- truth_sentinell 9y agoWhat's that foreign language and how do you study it? (If I might ask)
- Yahivin 9y agoHere's a great playlist featuring Richard Hamming with a CS focus on a similar topic: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30
- misiti3780 9y agoInteresting article, personally I think this is more useful: https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules
- zafka 9y agoThis reminds me of a book I read years ago: Learning How to Learn by Idries Shah It was an interesting look at Sufi thought.
- erikb 9y agoI haven't done that course but I have to agree. Learning how to learn is vastly important and really hard to do on your own, because the requirement is the same as the result.
- cpsempek 9y agoI find this interesting for two reasons. I think I recall that not too long ago, the most popular course on coursera was Ng's ML course. It is ironic that people are now more interested in teaching oneself how to learn versus a machine. This change could be attributed to other reasons like change in user demographics, or, market saturation, so that naturally popular courses will change once a large majority moves from one to the next. But I want to believe there is a more interesting phenomenon occurring where reading about abstract notions of learning causes a person to question how they themselves learn, and if the same abstract concepts apply. This is more a whimsical thought, than a serious one. The second reason this is interesting is it could be surfacing a real issue with the way we have become accustomed to ingesting data. Could it be that we are becoming aware and fearful that the long term effects of suckling the internet's spout of instant gratification is causing serious harm to our ability to "actually learn". Neither may be the case, but it seems like there is something interesting going on here.
- sien 9y agoIt is the most popular course on Coursera because it's ~3 hours of lectures and ~3 hours of study and it seems to be advertised for everyone who logs on to Coursera. Andrew Ng's Course is 11 weeks and it's about ~5 hours a week and on top of that you'd really want to be quite able at High School Maths and have some programming background.
- cpsempek 9y agoEasiness of the course is could be a big factor in it's popularity. A simpler explanation :).
- bbcbasic 9y agoI liked siens comment for the detail though.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoIt also has a broad appeal, someone could be studying social sciences or computer science and find it equally applicable.
- serkanh 9y agoI highly recommend this course. One thing i learned and have been practicing was how useful was memorization and spaced repetition practice of things i would like learn and understand.
- HumbleGamer 9y agoThis course revolutionized my views on learning. After taking it and applying the suggested techniques I've seen an amazing increase not just in my competence but my confidence. It left me feeling empowered. I was almost a bit sad when I reached the end.
- thegayngler 9y agoThis sounds awesome. Definitely going to check it out. Thanks for this post.
- ncfausti 9y agoThis. I learned that it's ok to feel dumb when learning difficult ideas, and to take a break, let your mind do some diffuse thinking, and come back to it.
- tchaffee 9y agoI'll report in too. I took the course and thought it was excellent. I love learning and have been learning new things for decades and thought my techniques were pretty good. I'm a very fast learner. The course helped me more than I was expecting and my learning speed and ability to memorize noticeably improved. Especially with the foreign language I'm studying. And the theories around how the brain works were interesting. And it's a pretty short course.
- Sinidir 9y agoWhich i neatly tagged away in my bookmarks feeling good about envisioning taking it some day in the future. :) :(
- lettergram 9y agoWasn't this the course also provided by the teaching company?
- senatorobama 9y agoWhat's the best MOOC on Compilers?
- deepnotderp 9y agoI saw the title and initially thought this was about AutoML.
- diegof79 9y agoThere is a book from the 80s with the same name "Learning How to Learn" by Gowin & Novak. The book was very influential to the UX field. Concept Maps -the technique presented in the book- is used a lot to understand user mental models. The book is 80% discussion about how to apply the technique in a classroom... 20% explaining the technique, but anyways it's worth the read. Edit: small correction, according to google the book was published in 1984
- open_bear 9y agoThere is a modern book called "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning" by Peter C. Brown that I quite liked.
- Aron 9y agoI find that learning how to learning how to learning how to learn is a good way to spend my time when I don't actually want to accomplish anything.
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- weishigoname 9y agotook the course, I think it is pretty good, it follow the rhythm our brain to remember something.
- CaRDiaK 9y agoTook the course, loved it. Bought the book, loved it. Encouraged my partner to check it out, she stuck through it. 3 years later she's about to graduate from college with her basic counselling education and experience behind her where she hit top of the class. She's about to set out on her own. This course was a massive driver and I'm not sure she'd have gone this way this quickly without it.
- mypath 9y agoI have heard that the way it is presented is very dry. I have read a summary on reddit and I think it is good, but I just don't have the time to spend on it.
- cJ0th 9y agoCan anyone of you report any long term benefits from these kind of courses? Personally, I think those classes (haven't looked into the coursera one) only present obvious stuff. I've once worked through "Make it stick", a book that is often recommended when it comes to learning. What I've found is that there is nothing wrong with the content but it did not really help. I imagine that most people who struggle with learning deal with some kind of psychological issues that need to get addressed. They need to learn how to deal with stuff like frustration, worries, perfectionism or self esteem.
- eighthnate 9y ago> Can anyone of you report any long term benefits from these kind of courses? None. It's like all self help books or "learning to read" books or etc. The only thing it does is make you feel like you are accomplishing something and actually "learning". But you are just wasting time. The title is even self-defeating. "Learning how to learn". How can you learn to learn without already knowing how to learn in the first place. In order for the class to be useful to you, you would have to already known how to learn to learn the material. Ultimately, those truly motivated would have gone on to learn what they wanted regardless of this course. And those unmotivated will not go on to learn regardless of this course.
- jstimpfle 9y ago> The title is even self-defeating. "Learning how to learn". How can you learn to learn without already knowing how to learn in the first place. Don't be overzealous in finding mistakes if you want to to understand. Approach things with a positive attitude. "Learn how to learn" can easily mean "Learn how to learn better". Almost nothing is black-and-white. That's just a little trick for you to learn I guess :-)
- TheCowboy 9y agoThis is completely antagonistic, and close-minded, without providing evidence. The course is by people who have studied these things and back up the methods with research (evidence). The goal is long-term retention and learning. The course addresses bad habits that people use for learning that don't accomplish this goal, and suggests better methods. I haven't taken the course but I'm familiar with some of the methods, such as spaced-repetition. Spaced-repetition hasn't falsely "made me feel like I am accomplishing something" and I've been surprised with the results over time. There is a body of research and evidence showing positive results. > How can you learn to learn without already knowing how to learn in the first place. This might feel like a clever comment but it's pedantic and doesn't contribute to the discussion. Most people have some minimal capacity to learn new things, and can also improve how they learn.
- cooervo 9y agoI took this course it is wonderful and good. Also read her book. I now always try to skim the index of a book or chapter before reading it. Also try to study in smaller sessions, every day, instead of cramming a ton of info in just one day.
- Pica_soO 9y agoSounds to me like a lot of people are searching for a course which will allow one to overcome a lack of intrinsic motivation. But all the best tools in the world wont make you a smith, if you find no fun in hammering red hot iron.