Learning How to Learn: Thoughts on a MOOC

I recently completed the MOOC "Learning How to Learn", provided by UC San Diego through Coursera.

Coursera provides the following description:

Whether you are an outstanding or a struggling student, "Learning How to Learn" will give you powerful mental tools that will help you learn more effectively in tough-to-master subjects. You will discover practical, immediately useful insights that will help you to more deeply master your studies.

Although the course claims to be suitable for a range of disciplines, a lot of the content was most appropriate for subjects where the goal is to be able to solve problems (maths, physics, etc.). It would be less appropriate for subjects that involve a lot of essay writing, for example. Some of the content was also only really relevant for people who were learning in a formal environment (i.e., who were preparing for tests). Most of the examples were aimed at a uni level, but I think the course would be equally useful for upper high school students.

The course went for 4 weeks, with 1-2 hours of videos each week. There was a specific textbook for the course which could be purchased from Amazon, as well as quite an extensive list of additional readings (popular articles, journal articles and books) for each week. I watched all of the videos but wasn't inspired to buy the book or do any of the other readings. Similarly, I did the weekly quizzes and final exam but I didn't bother with the peer assessments or the discussion forums.

Overall I thought the course was very well presented. This is the only MOOC I've done so far on learning, but I've done a few on teaching and I'm often struck by how bad the quality of the instruction is given the content matter. This course, on the other hand, did a great job of splitting the content up into bite-sized chunks, using diagrams and metaphors to explain the content, and summing up at the end of each section.

I think that learning is quite a personal thing, so I wasn't surprised that I found that I liked some of the course's ideas about learning more than others. Aspects that I liked:

• The fact that all of the advice was backed by scientific explanations. I think this made the course more interesting and helped to justify the points being made. But understanding why a particular technique was supposed to work really helped me to evaluate whether it was something that was likely to work for me.
• The distinction between focused and diffuse modes of learning (which was a big focus of the course). I think this is something I've always understood intuitively - when I was at uni I needed to spend an hour or two each day on the bus thinking about nothing in particular - but it was really interesting to hear an explanation of why this is important.
• Testing yourself as a good way of learning/studying. Something that was a new idea to me in this area that I wish I had thought of in high school is that you only need to practise doing the tricky part of a problem. I always thought of practice exams as being a relatively inefficient use of my studying time, because I would do them as if I was actually doing the exam. But this course pointed out that (in a maths problem, for example) you just need to figure out which formula or procedure is relevant, and you can skip any basic algebra or arithmetic. The course only really gave problem-solving examples, but you could achieve the same in an essay-based exam by writing an outline of an essay, writing down relevant quotes from a literature text, etc.
• The mental/emotional side of things, and in particular how your interpretation of physiological symptoms matters (e.g., interpreting an increased heart rate as excitement rather than nerves). I also totally agree with their idea of facing your fears. I remember at school people thought I was crazy because before a test I would sometimes say "I'm going to fail and I don't care". Even though I really wanted to get 100% on every test I took, failing one test wouldn't have been the end of the world. Accepting the worst possible outcome took a lot of weight off my shoulders and made my panic subside - and I never came close to failing any of the tests. I do wish that someone had pointed out to me at the time that this was true on a larger scale - failing a whole subject would not have been the end of the world. Teachers always gave the impression that I had to decide at the age of 14 what I wanted to do with my life and one wrong step would ruin everything. No-one ever told me in high school that if you did the "wrong" subjects there were always bridging courses, or that if you did well enough in your first year of uni you could transfer to a more difficult course. And certainly no-one told me that it was totally fine to wait until I was 21 to actually choose a career.

Things that don't work so well for me included:

• Pomodoro as a technique to avoid procrastination. Every time this was even mentioned (and it was mentioned a lot) I had heart palpitations. I can't understand how anyone can face spending 25 minutes straight on something they don't like. If I'm using a timer to beat procrastination I need to set it to 5 minutes at most - sometimes I need a 1 or 2 minute timer to make something seem bearable. Most of the tasks I procrastinate only take 5-10 minutes anyway. If I find myself repeatedly procrastinating a particular task, I ask myself why it's important to me. If I can come up with a good answer, that's often sufficient motivation to reduce the procrastination. And if I can't come up with a satisfactory answer, I remove the task from my todo list and just move on.
• Eating a frog first. I think this concept originated with Mark Twain, and maybe it worked for him, but for me it's a recipe for procrastination. If the first thing on my todo list is something difficult, my reaction tends to be 'I'll just do X first' (where X is something that is not on my todo list at all). And once I procrastinate about the first task on my list, it becomes very easy to procrastinate on the second, and the third, and... But if I start out with a half a dozen short, simple tasks, it gets me into a routine of just doing whatever is next on my list without stopping to consider whether it is something I want to do.
• The memory palace technique (method of loci). I have heard of this method before, and it always struck me as a really worthless technique, but at least this course made me realise why it's a useless technique for me - it relies on humans' apparently really good spatial memory. I have hopeless spatial memory. Once in a class I had to draw a map of my house and I missed an entire room despite having lived in the same house since I was a toddler. I'm much better off using my verbal memory and just rote learning a list than trying to visualise anything.

Overall I found the Learning How to Learn course very interesting. It would have been far more applicable if I had done it 15 years ago, but it was still nice to see the scientific background behind various study techniques so that I could understand why some techniques worked for me and some didn't. I would certainly recommend the course to anyone in high school or uni, particularly those studying STEM subjects.