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 you're taking this course because you want to get better at learning business, you want to learn self help better, you want to get better at your job, you want to learn a new language, or you want to get better at programming, design or mathematics. Maybe you had the idea that you want to become more knowledgeable or more skillful in a certain way, but you're not in an actual classroom. Great. That s exactly the situation for which I really like making projects. It makes projects interesting. That s why I ve made sure that the project approach we re taking can really work for that situation. The steps to follow in creating a practical learning project are similar to the ones we did for school. Even if you're not in school, I recommend looking at that lesson, because it s good for seeing how the parts work, how those six steps come together to create a project you can use for anything. The difference with practical learning projects is that they require a little bit more thinking or work on certain steps, and maybe on other steps they require less work than they would if you were in a school or a curriculum based program. We re going to consider two strategies for learning skills. I ll walk through the six steps for each of these strategies so you can see how they apply. The first is to follow a predetermined curriculum. That means you can select or generate a curriculum that you're going to follow. It s sort of an intermediate process between learning a skill directly and taking it in school. You pick a curriculum, but you're following it yourself rather than following what someone else gave you. The other approach is to set a skill benchmark, and use direct practice to try to learn the skill. Strategy A: Predetermined Curriculum Let s start with following a predetermined curriculum. 1) Define a Clear Goal The first step, as always, is to define a clear goal. This strategy involves finding an existing curriculum or generating one. The MIT Challenge was an example of this particular path. The MIT curriculum already existed, and I was going to follow that curriculum. 1 of 7
Another example could be taking an online course. I ve been mentioning throughout this class that I ve been taking a class in medical neuroscience in Coursera. I wanted to learn more about neuroscience, so I looked at some books, and it turned out that the best option for me was to take this course in Coursera. Great. It also could be following a recommended list of books. Let s say you want to take The Personal MBA with Josh Kaufman, and you want to learn about business. You could select some of his recommended list of 99 books and read and master them. It could be a specific textbook or guidebook. If you're learning a programming language, you might get an O Reilly book or you might get an online set of tutorials that you're going to follow for learning that programming language. The idea here is that you are actively seeking a curriculum. This makes the process of defining a clear goal somewhat easier, because you can make your goal simply completing the materials and exercises or getting a certain score like you would in a class. Another way that you could set your clear goal is to read an entire list of books or entire sections while taking notes and doing active recall. 2) Select Materials and Approach Selecting materials is quite easy if you've done the first part of defining your goal correctly. It s usually not that hard, because the material and the goal are usually in sync. 3) Estimate Time Required Estimating time required. Again, there are two methods. Top down: You pick a deadline and you try to make it fit by squeezing in things or deleting items. Or you can go bottom up: Figure out the total amount of time that is needed. That s actually about skipping ahead to Step 4, and then figuring out how much you want to invest every week. If you decide you can only spend five hours a week on this project, and you know it s going to take 100 hours, bam, 20 weeks. That s how long you're going to take to learn this particular project. 4) Set Deadlines and Milestones Deadlines and milestones. If you're taking an actual class, like you're taking something in Coursera or Udacity that you have to follow and it has actual dates, follow the approach that we discussed in the lesson on How to Create a Learning Project in School. If it is self paced a list of books, self paced textbooks, a course that doesn t have any deadlines and you just have the material then you want to set your own soft deadlines. These are going to be important because there are no hard deadlines. 2 of 7
5) Week by Week Investment The week by week time investment is easy. Once you have the deadlines and milestones, it s the same process as we discussed in the lesson on How to Create a Learning Project in School. If you haven t seen that, I recommend looking at it. Basically if you're doing something, say a reading list, this could be as simple as the number of pages per week that you want to cover. The idea here being that this will give you a sense of what you need to accomplish to stay on track, but also keeping it in the range of hours that you think you can reasonably invest. 6) Review and Adjust Finally, review and adjust. Same as always. Adjust your estimates based on what s actually happening in your projects. If you're going too slow, you may need to adjust either what you're doing in terms of work or your deadlines. Evaluation of Strategy Let s evaluate this strategy. This strategy is good for conceptual subjects like business, cognitive science, history. Anything that you would want to know more about. This is something that I've done a lot. I ve wanted to learn more about cognitive science. There is a cognitive science list of textbooks that is used for people planning on entering into a PhD program at the University of California, San Diego. It was about 44 books, and it covered topics such as artificial intelligence, linguistics, psychology and neuroscience. That s a perfect list of books to follow in this process of learning more about what is essentially a conceptual subject. I m not going to be doing a lot of practice here. I mostly want to have a deep understanding of that topic. If you are trying to learn something that s an actual practical skill, then you may want to use this approach if you can substantially learn the skill from a particular resource. If I'm learning a new programming language and I figure, I'll just pick up an O Reilly book, cover all the exercises and go through that book step by step, that s going to be a good way of learning that skill. On the other hand, there may be some skills that you can t learn deeply from one particular resource. One example of this is learning a language. If you're learning to speak French, for instance, yes, following Duolingo can help, but if you only follow Duolingo, you're probably not going to reach your goal. Similarly, if you're already fairly advanced in programming, you may not be able to find a single solitary resource that matches all of your needs. It may not be as simple as just delegating the process of improvement, the process of skill acquisition, to one particular curriculum. 3 of 7
Once again, this strategy weakens considerably if you look at the curriculum and say to yourself, Even if I do all of this, it s unlikely I'm going to get the results I desire. It s still useful to consider this strategy as part of a broader strategy. If you say to yourself, It would be really valuable if I did read all of these books or if I did follow this entire program, then you may want to do this as part of your broader project in improving your skill. Strategy B: Skill Benchmark The second way we can do it is a little different, and that s by setting a skill benchmark. 1) Define a Clear Goal You start by picking an objective assessment of the skill you d like to reach. One example is I might say to myself, I want to be able to hold a 30 minute conversation in Chinese about a pre selected topic. I m allowed to use a dictionary, but I'm not allowed to spend too much time working with the other person. It has to go fairly smoothly. Or you might want to say, I want to be able to program effectively with Java. I want to be able to do X and Y. I want to be able to build an application that can do X and Y in Java. These are examples of how you can define a clear goal to accomplish something. My may be worried that your goal is not objective enough, and you might fudge it and make it into something that it s not. For the 30 minute conversation in Chinese example you might say, I might be too easy on myself. I might pick a topic that s too easy, or I might make it so that the person knows me, and it s easy to chat, but it s not very indicative of my broader ability. Or I might pick a Java project that I can do, but it doesn t mean I can program well in Java. If you're unsure about this objectivity, I recommend seeking out external tests. These can be actual tests, like a language test or certification or a benchmark for skill. For example, if you are a freelance programmer, being able to get a client programming in a language is a good, clear benchmark, a clear goal. 2) Select Materials and Approach The next part is to select materials and approach. Unlike the other two cases where you consider learning in school and learning with a pre selected curriculum, this one actually requires some work. You need to organize material to help accomplish the goal. I recommend going online and searching for all the different ways that people can learn a particular subject. If you're learning something popular, chances are there s a considerable amount of material and information you can use. I recommend splitting the material you do find into two lists. 4 of 7
The main list of material is going to be where you primarily devote your time. If I were learning Chinese, I might find a dozen apps, a dozen textbooks, a dozen resources that I could use to learn Chinese, but I might decide that 95 percent of my time is going to be spent doing tutoring, it s going to be spent doing Anki. That s going to be my main list of two or three things. And then I have this backup list of material, so if I feel like I'm missing something from the main list, I can go to it. The reason I recommend creating these two separate lists of materials is that it s easy, I think, to get overwhelmed. You may want to chase the newest and brightest and flashiest learning materials instead of just picking something and sticking to it. This is common with language learning where people flop between different applications, try them out for an hour or two, but then they never commit to using it seriously enough to learn what they need to learn. What I recommend doing is having this backup list of materials just in case you want to switch in or swap out something, but you ll still have a main list, so you ll know what you need to focus on. 3) Estimate Time Required The next step is to figure out the time required. This is also harder because your goal is performance, not necessarily completing a certain set of tasks. I recommend doing interviews with successful learners to gather estimates of how much hourly time investment may be required. When I was learning Chinese, for instance, it was critical for me to figure out, What did people estimate for the amount of hours required to reach particular goals? These are going to range. Some people are going to say high time investments, some people are going to say low time investments. You have to judge that based on the strategy you're pursuing, and how well you feel you stack up to these people cognitively. If the person is incredibly intelligent and you feel they re much smarter than you, maybe you ll have to go slower than they will. If you think, No, I'm a pretty quick learner, and this person is going about it in a slower way, maybe you can do it a bit faster. That s a judgment call you have to make. The idea here is that if you can figure out the estimated times that it has taken for other people to go through it, you at least have some benchmarks with which to work. 4) Set Deadlines and Milestones The next part is to set deadlines and milestones. I recommend setting soft deadlines for two things. One is going to be for your performance benchmarks. If you're working toward a particular skill, you should be able to see skill growth throughout the process. And you should also set goals to reach as you progress through your materials. Once you ve picked your main list of materials I m going to use this textbook or I m going to use this app you might want to set some goals. For instance, After one month, I want to have finished 1,000 Anki cards, or After one month, I want to have finished 200 pages in this particular textbook. 5 of 7
Notice how there are two different types of goals? One of them is going to be about your progress through the material, which is helping you be reasonably confident that you're staying on track with the amount of time and effort you wanted to invest. But the other goal is about these performance benchmarks to see if you are on track for reaching your eventual learning goal. 5) Week by Week Investment The next step is to calculate the week by week investment. This is often the easiest part of this project, because it s usually pretty simple. You're usually not generating complicated curriculums. When I was learning Chinese, for instance, every week was pretty much the same. I had dedicated this much time for tutoring, this much time for doing Anki, this much time for doing a little bit of grammar and textbook practice. It was the same investment every single week. You often find with skill benchmark type projects that you are not working through it in the same way that you would be if you were doing a predefined curriculum where there may be more complicated material. You're working on different projects, you're working on different reading assignments, there are different assignments and exercises that you need to integrate into this scheduling approach. 6) Review and Adjust Finally, review and adjust. This also requires monitoring not only your progression through the material and your productivity but also your performance. You may need to adjust to see whether you're meeting your expectations. If you're off on a benchmark, if you realize, It s taking me a lot longer to learn this than I thought it would, or Wow, I m zipping through this. Then you may want to adjust your goals. I don t recommend changing goals unless you have to change goals, because if you start changing them too often they become really soft and they don t stand up to scrutiny. On the other hand, often you don t have a choice. It s often that you can only set a tentative goal, because you don t know what your speed of progress is going to be. One recommendation I make is to set a target, and then decide to re evaluate it at a certain point. So after a month of working through your project you might decide to re evaluate what your six month eventual deadline is going to be. Evaluation of Strategy Evaluating this strategy, this is good for learning practical skills languages, programming, design, things that you actually have to use and for which you have to have a certain level of performance. The advantage is that it focuses you directly on what you want rather than on an arbitrary curricular goal. I think this can be particularly advantageous if the curriculums that are out there don t promise the level of skill 6 of 7
that you want, or they don t promise being able to be good at said skill after, which is common. A lot of curriculums are focused on concepts and theory instead of actual practice. The disadvantage is that predicting performance improvements is hard, so setting the right level of difficulty is often a challenge. Both of these strategies Strategy A where we talked about using a predetermined curriculum or generating a curriculum or Strategy B where we talked about setting skill benchmarks can be quite useful. The project methodology, what we re using in this week of the course, of creating a project and working through those six steps to create this document that you will have that will guide your progress in the future, is still useful for going through it. Regardless of whether you're in school, whether you're learning something on your own, or whether you're trying to improve a practical skill, this project learning approach is valuable, and I highly recommend it. 7 of 7