School Based Projects

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Leslie Patterson
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1 Welcome to the Week One lesson. School Based Projects Who is this lesson for? If you're a high school, university or college student, or you're taking a well defined course, maybe you're going to your community center and taking a particular course to learn Spanish or you are online and you're learning a course through Coursera, this lesson is going to apply to the majority of people taking Rapid Learner. Either you are in a formal education program, that could be in grade school, high school, university, college, post graduate studies, something where you're given a syllabus, a defined curriculum, maybe you have multiple classes. You are doing classes or some type of class as your self study as the project you want to do in this class. That could be classes through Coursera, Audacity. It could even be a class that you've gotten something like this, like Rapid Learner. This is going to apply to the majority of you here, and I want to tell you how you can make projects based on what you're trying to learn, based on the format you ve already been given that are going to be successful so you can learn efficiently and also so you can apply the lessons of this course. Why do you need a project if you already have a curriculum? One question you might ask yourself is, why do I need to have a project if I'm already in some kind of formal curriculum? Why would I need to have a project if I'm already given a course that s broken down week by week and has assignments and practice, why don t I just do that? Forming a project is more than just having a finished plan. It s more than saying, This is what I'm going to do week by week. You're right. If you look at a syllabus for a lot of courses it does seem to provide something amounting to a plan for learning the subject that you're learning. However forming a project is also about the activity of planning. By doing the planning and thinking through where you're going to make your time investments, making decisions about What s going to happen if I get off track? Thinking ahead of different scenarios that might happen and resolving them ahead of time, this is going to have a big effect on your motivation. It s going to allow you to have more commitment to the project, to getting it done. More importantly, I think it s going to take a lot of this stuff that s been skimmed over in your course, like how do you review for things? How do you do extra studying? How much time do you need to read things? It s going to solidify these details so you're going to be able to do well in your classes. Creating a project will also allow you to make important adjustments and decisions about how you want to process the curriculum. People who create curriculums, and this includes me when I created this course, have many different users in mind. When I created this course I wasn t thinking this course is for John Smith, and he has an exactly this kind of thing he wants to learn, otherwise it wouldn t be such a general course. 1 of 7

2 Instead, in my head, I'm imagining many different people who might be taking this course. From a high school student to a college student to someone who s doing graduate studies, to someone who s trying to do the MIT Challenge, to learning a language, I have a lot of different end users in mind. What this means, not only for me but for the people teaching your classes, is that we re going to present what we think is the best fit for the most people, but that doesn t necessarily mean that it s the best fit for you, even if it is a good course. Creating a project is going to allow you to make adjustments to the format that you ve been given, within reason, within the realm of changes you can make, and in doing that, it s going to allow you to have a bit of extra control to accomplish your goal. Step One: Define a Clear Goal Let s go through the six steps that we talked about in the quick lesson here, and go through them. How do they work for creating a learning project in school? The first step with all learning projects is to define a clear goal. If you are doing multiple classes, as you would be if you are in high school or university, I recommend setting a project that encompasses all of your classes for the term. Instead of making a different project for each class, which is going to make things complicated, just make your project about doing all the classes. Next, you should pick a specific target. A good example of this is I want to get 80 percent in all my classes. I want to graduate with distinction from a particular class. I want to be able to do something after the end of the class if you're not taking a class merely to get a grade or to get credit. If you're taking Spanish, you might say, After this class I want to be able to have a 15 minute conversation in Spanish. These are all good, specific goals for setting your target. When I was doing the MIT Challenge, even though I didn t have such a high bar, but my goal was that I wanted to pass the final exams and do the programming projects. You can see here this is quite specific and clear. You may want to set somewhat different goals for different classes based on your own desires and difficulties. Let s say you are a computer science major and you are taking four computer science classes and you are taking a French class as well just for fun. You may have specific goals for your computer science classes. You may say, I want to get A s in all of my computer science classes. But your French one you may not have as strong a feeling that you ll be able to do well in French. Maybe you ll say, I ll be happy if I can get a B in my French class. Or you might want to set different goals based on what you want to accomplish in them. If you're doing a web design class, you may want to get more than just a good grade, you may want to be able to do something with web design after that. It s OK to have different goals for different classes. It s also OK to have the same goal for all the classes. I want to point this out in case you are taking multiple classes. 2 of 7

3 Step Two: Select Learning Materials Let s look at the next step, which is going to be selecting the learning materials. Normally, this is just going to be the stated materials for the course. These would be the lectures that you're supposed to attend. The readings you're supposed to do from textbooks or course notes. It s going to be the assignments that you have to do. It s going to be whatever projects you're working on. It may be some additional materials. You could consider lab materials. My feeling is that I'm using the term materials kind of broadly. In some cases they may not be a physical material, it may be a learning activity. I think it s important to think about the learning materials you're going to be using in the course. For most of the time, I say stick with what they tell you the learning materials are. Don t try to be too creative, because that s going to get you into trouble. However if you have a lot of experience with this course, tied up with this instructor, with this type of field, you may decide, I m not going to have time to do X or Y, so I'm going to eliminate those. I ve spoken to people in certain types of courses where the stated materials are clearly more than anybody can manage in their schedule. It s up to the student to decide which ones they want to use and which ones they don t want to use. In these cases you might have to make some selections. One thing to do is if you have too much material to go through, if you ve been given more material than you ll have to use. An example of this is I did a physics course for the MIT OpenCourseWare and they had practice exams and assignments I think for several years of those classes, different questions for each of those years. Clearly doing the MIT Challenge I didn't have enough time to go through all the material for one section once, never mind going through multiple years. In these cases, when you have this situation, you need to do triage. Triage is a concept that comes from battlefield medicine where you treat the people who you can save, you ignore the people you can t save because they re already wounded or the people if you do make some medical intervention they were going to live anyways. This is how you have to deal with it in your own life, is you have to use the material which is going to create an impact in your learning materials and your studies. That means omitting material that you already knew or admitting material where even taking that material is not going to help you with that particular topic or subject. If you have too little material, some classes, particularly if you're taking classes online or you're following some kind of curriculum outside of this normal context, you may need to supplement. This also happened to me during the MIT Challenge where I was given classes that just have slideshows and not course notes. I asked myself, How am I going to learn this? In these cases it meant that I had to find some materials online that I could use to supplement some of the ideas so I could get explanations about some of the concepts. Some other examples we can think of supplementing would be tutoring. You can make your self made questions for recall, resources online, Wikipedia, these are all places that you can go to to supplement if you don't have enough material. 3 of 7

4 Again, my recommendation is to start with the prescribed readings, lectures, assignments and only modifying it once you know more about the relative importance. Remember, this plan that you're creating for your project is an organic document. Once you start taking the class, you may realize, The lectures and the readings are exactly the same. I can omit one. Or you may decide, The lectures cover everything that s in the reading, but they also miss some things, so maybe I'm OK to do all the readings, but I might not attend every single lecture. Or same thing with assignments. You might think, These assignments are not all for marks. I m going to focus only on the ones that I need to to pass the class. Step Three: Estimate Time Required Let s move to the third step, which is estimating the time required. This one is easy. It corresponds to the deadline for when the course is complete. If you do have some flexibility in the deadlines, you do have a little bit of wiggle room in when the course is over, which can be the case if you're doing an online course, then what I recommend doing is adding up the total time to go through all the materials, all the necessary studying and review, and then calculate that based on the weekly time investment. This is a bottom up calculation strategy, but if you decide, I want to take this class. I want to spend 10 hours learning this class per week. Then go through it and figure out where you are going to fit in this time in your week. You get to 10 hours. And then from there you figure out how long it will take to go through all the materials to finish the course, which you might say, OK, it s going to take me six or eight weeks. Step Four: Set Deadlines and Milestones The next step is to set your deadlines and milestones. The first place to start is with the hard deadlines. This is your exam dates, your quiz dates, assignment due dates, when you have to hand that essay in, put those down. These ones cannot be moved, and so it s important to write these down first. Next you need to calculate how much work is required to lead up to each point. For some classes this might be a little bit more complicated, but what I'm asking you to do is I'm saying that for this particular assignment or quiz, let s say it s a quiz that s covering Week One and Week Two material and it s taking place sometime in Week Three or Week Four. In this case you have to know Week One and Week Two material. Add up all those lectures and reading assignments and figure out how much work is required to lead up to each point. Keep in mind when you're doing this you should also be adding in the normal amount of time you spend studying. Beyond doing the reading and the assignments given to you in the course, how much time would you normally spend reviewing or preparing before a quiz or exam? Once you ve decided how much work is required behind each deadline, I want you to look to see if there are any lumps in your schedule. This is something that usually doesn t happen in an individual class, but it may happen if you're taking multiple classes. 4 of 7

5 I ll give you an example. If you're taking five classes, it s common for those five classes to have their midterms all in the same month. You may have five midterm exams that you are expected to study for all in October. Whereas September there s nothing, and in November maybe there s only one. You have a crazy month for October, but you don t have a crazy month for September of November. What do you do about this? This can happen in many different classes, and it s usually because there s a natural rhythm to a course where you want to have some kind of test in the middle and some kind of test at the end. This is how it piles up, because you're doing the classes in the same timeframe. What you can do about this is you can shift back work by making soft deadlines so the effort is smoothed out. As I gave my example, let s say you have those five midterms all in the same week. Instead of doing the studying for those five exams all in the same week, maybe you did the studying for one of the midterms three weeks before that actual exam. It was way ahead of time, none of your other classmates are studying for it yet, but you re already done with the studying so all you have to do is maybe an hour or two of review before the actual class comes. You don t have to do the 10 hours of studying and now you're burning yourself out trying to study for all of these exams. This is a little complicated. Some of these things that you're going to be able to smooth out fairly easily, some of them you're not going to be able to do. For example, if you're taking a class and most of the important material that you need to start a project or essay, let s say, is coming right before that point in time, and you have the same situation for multiple classes, then you might just be busy, you might not be able to do it. What I do recommend is looking at your schedule and being creative about it, because I've found that in most cases, it s possible to make these soft deadlines so that you can shift the work around and smooth out how much you're working throughout the semester, throughout the course load. If you want a little bit more information on soft deadlines, we do have another lesson on that. In that one I'm going to be explaining why if you treat these soft deadlines like they re hard deadlines, so you pretend that you're studying for this exam like it s tomorrow, not three weeks from now. Not just, It would be nice to study ahead of time. But these are deadlines that you use that they re functional in your system, then you can make your academic life much easier because you have a smoothed out process, you're not burning yourself out and you can devote 100 percent of your cognitive ability in each particular instance instead of getting exhausted and wasting it when you need it most. Step Five: Week by Week The next step is to get the week by week breakdown of your schedule. With your soft and hard deadlines in hand, break down your schedule into week by week components. This should include all of your readings, assignments, lectures. I highly recommend getting an agenda if you're doing a class, because although some learning projects that people are going to be doing in this Rapid Learner program are going to be the kinds of projects that maybe you don t need to have this detailed breakdown that, Eight weeks from now I'm going to be doing exactly this, because maybe they re almost the same every single week. 5 of 7

6 When I was learning languages, for instance, I had about the same weekly task that I was doing each week. Similarly with the MIT Challenge I was doing classes so quickly that each week would be a new class so there would not be that much need for this kind of long term planning. However if you're taking a couple of classes, let s say, what I recommend doing is getting an agenda and writing out what you need to do every single week. That should mean reading assignments, assignments, problem sets, also include your lectures, also include your labs. I know sometimes people don t typically think of those as being homework, but they take up your time, and because they take up your time they should go in this system so that you know exactly how many hours you're spending. Also include reviewing. If you feel like you need to do reviewing and studying, that should be included as well. At this point you may want to check the total time that is required each week and double check whether you were able to get that smoothness by making those soft deadlines previously. If you're not, if it looks like, Oh wow. I ve got a couple of weeks where there s almost no work, and then I've got some weeks that are crazy amounts of work, then you might need to make some further adjustments. So you might want to shift some things around, make some new soft deadlines. If you can t do that, then you should at least be aware that there s going to be these crunch periods coming up, so that you can also organize the rest of your life around it and make sure that you are well rested, that you are not burning yourself out before these crunch periods come up. The best way to do this is to take this syllabus, take down all the things that you have there and put it into this week by week breakdown. Another quick reminder: Include your studying and review time. I can t tell you how many people they spend a lot of time studying, but they don t include it in this period. If you normally spend 20 hours per exam studying before a test, then you should put 20 hours of time into your schedule. This course I'm hoping that you're going to be able to learn more efficiently, but you cannot start on a basis where you have unrealistic expectations. Starting with how you're currently studying is the right foundation to build the correct studies. It doesn t make sense to build some schedule where you don t have any studying or review time and then when you get to the final exam you find out, Oh, I need to do all this studying and review, and you're putting in tons and tons of time. That doesn t work for this week by week breakdown. Step Six: Review and Adjust The final step is to review and adjust. There s going to be a couple of things you're definitely going to make changes for in your progress. 1) Can anything be deleted from the materials? (Note: This is rare.) Now that you ve been going through the classes for a bit, you maybe have a couple of weeks under your belt, is there something you can remove that isn t helpful? I m putting this up as a rarity, because I think for the majority of the students and the majority of situations for the results that they want to get, I m thinking of people who are in this course are not here to pass typically, they want to get 85 percent, 95 percent, they want to get A pluses, in those cases, it is dangerous to delete 6 of 7

7 material just because it only takes missing one idea, one concept that was in the lectures and not in the reading material that if you deleted the lectures now you are behind. I generally recommend that you're probably not going to want to delete things. However, there may be a situation, depending on your goals, depending on the class, where you may decide, I'm not going to do this element of the course, because I don t feel it s worth my time or it s valuable enough. 2) Were your estimates off for the time required? Adjust and advance. Another thing is to check your estimates. Were your estimates off for the time required? Per week, the amount of time that was required to do particular assignments or reading things. I would highly recommend if you budgeted in your schedule, It's going take me an hour to do each of these reading assignments, but now it s taking me three hours, you need to adjust your schedule, you need to update your estimates. This is an important part of adjusting and making your ideas more concrete. Remember the plan is an organic document. It s not something you can set fixed and stick with 100 percent. You have to make adjustments. 3) Were your estimates off for personal productivity? Adjust your plan. Were your estimates off for your personal productivity? Even if your were right with the estimates, did you overestimate how much you were going to be able to work per week? Did you overestimate how diligently you were going to be able to study? In these cases you might have to adjust your plan again. Some cases you might not be able to. Maybe you have fixed deadlines and your goals are fixed so what you need to work on is improving your personal productivity. But in other cases if you do have some flexibility or you do have some choice about what you're pursuing, you may decide, This is too much work. I can t do all this work, so therefore I need to make this goal a little easier. Your first project plan, it may not be as accurate as you d like it to be. You may have some situations where you plan for this and something completely different happened. That s OK. Especially in this school project I've given you a lot of detail. This is quite a sophisticated planning approach that can take you maybe a couple of hours to do, if you're taking a couple of classes, and so this is the kind of thing that maybe you're going to get some stuff wrong. You're going to get one of those things wrong that we just talked about, that you're going to have to adjust for, or you're going to make things wrong that you can t adjust for that easily. That s OK. I'm hoping that if you continue to practice this technique, if you continue to plan for more projects, you're going to get better and better, you're going to get more and more accurate, and then what s going to happen is that when you need to tackle something difficult in the future, you're going to be able to whip up a plan, and it s no longer going to feel like, Oh my god. How do I do this? How do I get the result I want? It s going to feel like, All I have to do is create this plan and work at it. This is isn t something that you're going to be able to do necessarily your first time, but it is something that I hope that you will be able to do in the long term. This has been for Week One Rapid Learner. I wish you the best of the luck with the rest of the materials in the course. 7 of 7

Creating Projects for Practical Skills

Creating Projects for Practical Skills Welcome to the lesson. Practical Learning If you re self educating, meaning you're not in a formal program to learn whatever you're trying to learn, often what you want to learn is a practical skill. Maybe