Home Alone
Study hacks, and quick and easy ways to learn are all over the internet.
“Why I stopped going to class and so should you” is one of the more clickbaity titles, and it sounds like the dream - learn at home, at your own pace, and spend the extra time getting paid for work experience while you study.
I’m travelling right now, and in many ways my job is flexible enough to accomodate this. I can watch short videos, tweet, respond to email queries, and livestream my conference talk remotely, all while travelling. If it works for the teachers, why doesn’t (or shouldn’t) this work for students?
The truth is that it does work for some students, but they are the exception, not the norm. Let’s talk about why this is the case, and dive into a few study strategies that may help you study online more efficiently.
Online Study Habits
I have been teaching an introductory microbiology course for over 10 years, and every lecture we deliver is recorded so students can watch it after the fact. While not originally intended to replace in class attendance, slowly but surely students stopped coming to class.
I get it - life is busy, and everyone needs money to eat. But for the students who didn’t attend, surely they would watch the lecture videos afterwards to catch up? When I looked at the data over 10 years of running the course, less than half of the students in the class watch the videos, even though in person attendance dropped to only 10% (!). Despite our best intentions, it takes a lot of discipline and motivation to stay up to date with our online studies, alone in our rooms at home.
Online learning increases the physical distance between instructors and students, and between students and other students too. It takes a mature learner who knows how to manage their own time and balance responsibilities, to do this effectively time and time again. That’s why most students who complete an online qualification already have a qualification in hand. They already have family, friends, and a sense of identity, so all they need from studying is the qualification. If you are a first year student, you need so much more from your studies than just the qualification. You need to learn transferable social and communication skills, form lasting friendships and social networks, and meet teachers and mentors that can guide your career paths for the next 10 or more years. Videos are very powerful tools for learning, but they can’t give you all of the intangibles that a campus based experience can provide.
Of course it might not be your choice to study online, you may not be able to travel, or have financial difficulties, or family responsibilities. Let’s try to work smarter and use a tennis term to explore this further - how to avoid unforced errors in your online learning.
Location, Location, Location
Where you study matters - if you’re playing computer games or watching TV in the same location as where you’re studying, that is an unforced error waiting to happen. Doesn’t have to be far, just the other side of the room even, and straight away you’re making a conscious physical decision to separate work and play.
An outdated version of this is “no TV or computer screens where you’re studying” but so much learning is online these days I don’t think that’s feasible. It’s very common to keep all your notes on your computer, and it’s so much easier than dragging notebooks and textbooks around. But herein lies another potential unforced error - downloading slide and copying other people’s google docs is quite simple to do - a little too simple, or passive, and its cognitive load or burden on you is low. It takes a lot more energy to take sprawling hand written notes by trying to decipher your professor’s handwritten chalk writing, but it is a more active process with higher cognitive load.
Now does that mean you should go back to the stone ages and only use hand written notes? A happy medium can work well, use a tablet with a stylus - the tactility and activity of hand writing notes, but with the convenience of digital archival. Don’t just leave your notes in this form, try to distil them down again - say 3 key concepts from the class, maybe this time into a small handwritten notebook you can carry with you everywhere. Just sitting there and reading the notes again and again isn’t active learning, and you need to give your brain the best chance to succeed.
Wax On Wax Off
All of this self-directed learning takes a lot of discipline and motivation, which is not a given (especially when you’re studying alone at home). Like anything though, you can train your discipline in self directed learning over time. The Pomodoro technique encourages this, by chunking your study sessions into manageable intervals, broken up by small rewards.
25 minutes of study, 5 minute break.
25 minutes of sitting on one side of the table taking notes, 5 minutes on your phone watching YouTube…
You only need to be disciplined enough to focus for a short burst of time, and over time your resistance against distractions will improve. Instead of 25 minutes then a break, could be 35 or 45 minutes - you can develop this skill set over time and the earlier you start the easier it will be.
Forest for the Trees
I walk through some more tips for online study in the video below, and while that’s all well and good, what if you really hate what you’re studying? Or even worse, you just have no feelings at all towards the field other than apathy? Not knowing where you’re going, or dreading the direction you’re heading into is an insidious feeling that corrodes everything around you and dampens your best efforts. The best thing you can do is to externalise these anxieties - talk to your peers, teachers, or career counsellors about what you like or don’t like about your study area to try and find the thing worth pursuing for you.
It’s much easier to stay mindful in the moment if you can see the potential for the final destination. We all need some help figuring this out.
Jack.
