What You Need to Learn

Welcome to the Week One lesson. What You Need to Learn Nearly all self education learning endeavors start with materials. An exception to this which is something I'm going to be covering later is the pure practice model, but for the most part, if you're going to learn something on your own, whether it is a language, whether it s business skills, whether it s programming, whether it s a professional skill, whether it s history, you're going to need materials. You're going to need books. You're going to need videos. You're going to need practice problems. You're going to need some way to get the knowledge in your head and actually learn it. These materials can include books, videos, problem sets, tutoring. Sometimes they may be better defined as an activity instead of actual material. I'm using the term material kind of loosely here. I don t want to give the impression that it always has to be something physical. An example of a material that is not something that you d normally think of as a material is tutoring. If I'm learning a language, having a conversation partner and having a conversation with them may be a type of material that I'm using, even though you're not necessarily thinking of another person as being a material. These are all ways that you're going to learn and get information into your head so you can actually learn things you want to learn. A good base of material has three components. First it has a curriculum, which is an outline of how you're going to learn what you want to learn. It has coverage material. This is how you get your first exposure to the ideas, to the concepts, to the theory involved, to the facts. Even for learning projects that are very much focused on skills, you still need some coverage material to give you some orientation of how you should be practicing those skills. Even if you're doing something like drawing, let s say, it s still useful to read a little bit. That will give you some coverage of how you're going to guide your drawing efforts. The next is practice material. Practice material are things like problem sets, they re things like doing exams, they are projects, they are essays, they are ways you're using this material, using the ideas you ve learned in the coverage as a way of reinforcing the concepts, as a way of building knowledge. Practice is something that we re going to be covering a lot in Week Three, so I'm jumping the gun a little bit by introducing it here, but it is important that it is a major type of material you should be looking for when you build your projects. Finding a Curriculum Let s look at the first step of finding a curriculum. 1 of 6

For small topics it may not be necessary to have a curriculum. If you want to learn something small and specific, you might not need a huge outline of what you want to learn. If I want to learn something that I can learn in an afternoon or if I'm learning it over a week, maybe I don t need a curriculum. Maybe I can just learn as I go. However, If you have something you want to learn deeper or broader, then you ll benefit from having a curriculum. And there can be curricula at different levels too. Think of the MIT Challenge. There was a curriculum for the entire computer science undergraduate program that was outlining how MIT expected to take people with minimal computer science knowledge and turn them into people who have an undergraduate degree s worth of computer science knowledge. Then there were also the curricula for the individual classes. For every single class I took, it had its own syllabus, its own plan for learning material. The best way to get this kind of curriculum, I recommend, if you are trying to learn from a particular goal is to search online for how other people learn X. If you want to learn a language, search online for How do other people learn Spanish, How do other people learn French. and you re going to get tons and tons of different suggestions for curricula. They could be things like taking Duolingo, taking Rosetta Stone, taking Pinsler. It could be things like, I recommend doing immersion and going to a place and having conversations with people. This may not sound like an entirely satisfying approach. It might be like, I d like to know what the best curriculum is. I d like to know the best way to go about learning X. And that s going to differ for every single subject you have. The best way you have is to go online, see what options are out there, see what people are saying about those options so that you can get a sense of do people think this is a good way to learn a language or do they think it s a bad way, let s avoid using that curriculum. The main way that this is helpful for doing this is that it s going to weed out a lot of irrelevant or misleading curricula, and that makes up for this meta knowledge problem. What is the meta knowledge problem? The meta knowledge problem is that when you start learning something, you don t know what it is you're going to learn exactly otherwise you d already know it. Because you don't know what you're going to learn exactly, you don t really know what the weaknesses, strengths or obstacles are going to be, or what are going to be the things that you need to focus on when learning it. As you start to learn it you're going to build this meta knowledge and get better at learning what you're trying to learn. In the beginning it can be quite difficult. Because of this, it s good to start with, especially if you're new to the subject entirely, how other people learn X if you don t already have a strong intuition about what s the best way to learn something, because this is going to avoid a lot of the worst ways to try to learn something that you might have if you completely ignore it and you just decide to do something that nobody thinks works. Another example is if the topic is academic, so if it s something that you could learn in school, I recommend things like MOOCs. If you want to learn an entire domain, maybe more than just a particular class, I recommend looking at the class lists for particular programs. That was what I did for the MIT Challenge, I went and I looked up what are the classes that an MIT undergraduate student has to take. I Googled around for that. When I found it, I said, This is going to be my benchmark for what classes I want to take, because this is a pretty good approximation of what I think an MIT student would have to know. 2 of 6

Another example could be that I know that things like Coursera have specializing tracks which have multiple classes. You may want to emulate this approach. One thing to be aware of is that academic and practical skills may differ. For example, if you want to learn programming and you decide, I m going to take a big chunk of the MIT computer science curriculum, you may find yourself learning a lot of math, you may find yourself learning differential equations and how to prove theorems. You may say to yourself, This is all great, but this isn't what I wanted. I wanted to be able to design websites. It s important to recognize that academic goals and practical goals can be different so when you're doing this, I recommend being clear what you want. If you want to have a more academic knowledge and you're OK with I want to learn it the way someone would learn it in university, sticking with that list is pretty good. If you want to get a particular skill out of it, you may have to make some modifications to such a list, or you may want to go with a completely different learning approach that doesn t emphasize this academic track. Another thing to talk about is that there s often going to be lists of books or lists of resources that you can have that if, let s say, you wanted to learn history, you might Google around and say, What are the best books for learning about the American Civil War? And you ll get a list of 10 books and maybe you say to yourself, That s going to be my curriculum. That s going to be what I focus on is reading these 10 books. As I said, book lists are another good resource for coverage material. Coverage Material The next part is once you have this curriculum, once you have this general idea of what to go through, now you need coverage and practice material. Coverage material, once you ve located a curriculum, this should give you a pretty good indication of how you're going to cover this subject. If you are, let s say, following a particular class and it has some materials put online, then great. You're going to follow those materials. If you're looking at a book list, great, you know which books you need to download. Great coverage material can be things like books, audio, video, web tutorials, any way that you get a first introduction to the ideas. Having one on one tutoring or having a lecture is also good, although it can be quite expensive. These are the ways that you are getting your first touch at the material. When I don't know anything about quantum physics, what s my first step? I need to read a book about it, so some of it will tell me what quantum physics is, what the equations are, what are the big ideas, that's the first step. It may not be enough to learn the material, and in many cases it isn t, but it is the minimum requirement. There are two important points I want to make. 1) Coverage is only as good as you make it. 3 of 6

For a lot of people who are going to be seeking was us the absolute best book, or what is the absolute best resource you can use, and then they don't actually go through with it. They don t read it or they skim it or they don t do it in detail. This is the point I want to stress, because if you're trying to teach yourself a lot of subjects there s going to be a temptation to quibble over the material, to spend too much time thinking, Should I do this or should I do that? I know that a lot of people who are learning a language, for instance, ask me the question, Should I use Pinsler? Should I use Duolingo? Should I use a textbook? What material should I use? The truth is that if you follow them rigorously, all of them will be fairly good. Some of them are going to be better than others, and particularly for a language, you may find that having conversation practice is one material that you can t do without, but with regards to a lot of them, which textbook should you use, honestly if you do both the textbooks, they re probably going to be in the same ballpark of being as good as each other. It s important to recognize that your commitment to follow through with the material is much more valuable than just having the right book, video or lecture. 2) More material isn t always better. If you are picking up tons and tons of books and material to cover these ideas, it can be helpful, but it can also be overwhelming, and it can distract you from the task you have to do, which is actually going through the material. Practice Material The next part, and this is something that many people neglect with self education is getting practice material. Coverage material is great. It s a minimum requirement for building a self education project in many cases, but it is not good enough in most cases. If you're learning something hard, something you want to have a deep level of knowledge with, you're also going to need practice material. Practice material varies from subject to subject, but it involves using the knowledge directly. It s not just consuming the knowledge, not being the passive recipient of it, but actually implementing it. This could be problems in problem sets, in assignments, it could be projects, it could be tests, it could be essays, it could be practice with another person. Practice material can sometimes be hard to find, and if that s the case I recommend at minimum using the question book method for maintaining your knowledge. That s a technique we re going to be covering in Week Three. But what I want you to do when you're going through this is I want you to focus on getting some material that you can to practice because that s going to be valuable in building your knowledge. This is particularly true if you're learning hard subjects and hard skills. Often this practice material you don t have to overthink it. For a language, good practice material is actually using the language, speaking to people. If you're learning programming, good practice material is building 4 of 6

something with your programming knowledge. I want to stress this point, because this is something that sometimes people forget. They focus so much on coverage that that becomes their entire goal, and they forget that they re going to need to do practice if they want to learn it deeply. Pure Practice Project One thing I want to suggest is there s also another type of self education project that doesn t use materials. This is what I call a pure practice project. This is a practice project where you learn entirely by doing. You just learn by trial and error doing it with the actual subject. You learn to paint by just painting a lot. You learn to code by just trying to write programs, you don t follow a curriculum or a guide. You learn a language by just speaking it. Pure practice projects are quite rare. Most of the time I find people do use some material. But I want to stress that this is something that happens. People will learn things and learn them quite well by going with the pure practice approach. It is kind of rare, but I wanted to bring it up, because it s an alternative. I don t want to suggest that you need to have a book if you want to learn to draw, because maybe what you need to do is just draw a lot. And by drawing a lot and your own trial and error and your own experience, you're going to get better at drawing. These tend to be better for practical skills than conceptual subjects. I don t know what a pure practice model would look like if you were trying to learn history. There s not really a way of doing that. But if you're trying to learn something that s very practical, than having a pure practice approach isn t bad. Even if you decide to add new material, even if you decide to add a few books or a few guides, it s probably better to have a lot of practice than it is to have too much reading and theory and not enough doing of the work. Even in a pure practice project you're probably still going to return to material to get past sticking points, but it s not the core focus. I want to just briefly summarize what we ve learned here. If you're going to find material, the first step is to find a curriculum. Find something that you can follow that has some track record of success for helping people learn that subject. You may want to investigate a little bit between alternative curricula to figure out which one is best for you and and what you want to learn. There s nothing wrong with spending a couple of hours figuring out which curricula is best. At the same time, what you're going to need once you have this curriculum is to stick with it. That means getting coverage material to get that first exposure to the ideas, which in many cases will be enough to learn it, but if you need to learn something deeper, if it s particularly difficult, then you're also going to need practice material, and practice material are the assignments, they re the tests, they re the projects, they re the using the material in the real situations that s going to make you deeply learn it. 5 of 6

Finally there s the pure practice project which is an extreme version of just using practice materials or using no materials at all, just going out there and using the skill to learn it. Very few people do a pure practice project, but it is a useful reference point to keep in mind, because a lot of projects work best when they re close to a pure practice project rather than close to a very academic exercise. 6 of 6