How To Learn From Online Courses And Other Resources
If you’re someone who is looking to make money online, then chances are at some point you’ve gotten into the habit of buying or otherwise accumulating online courses and resources.
If you’re like most of the people who the above applies to, chances are you’ve got a ton of bookmarks and online PDF’s and the like which you’re planning on going through at some indeterminate stage.
I’m one of those people. I sign up for free and cheap Udemy courses. I wait until membership programs have massive sales to get new members in. If there’s something technical I need to learn like laying out a book for print, I’ll see if there’s a specific course on that. I also bookmark YouTube tutorials if I think that they’ll ever be useful.
Sometimes, I decide I need to go through these courses and actually learn something. When I do, this is how I do it.
Note Taking
There’s no use buying a video course, reading a book or going to a seminar if you’re not going to take notes.
Essentially, the goal of this part of the learning process is to chop up your learning materials into easily digestible chunks.
If you’re at a live training, I recommend getting a Dictaphone app and recording everything. I use Smart Voice Recorder. It’s on Android, has no limits (aside from space on your device) and works pretty well. Then you’ve got a recorded format from which to work with.
Back on point, let’s say you have ten hours’ worth of material. You don’t want to have to re-watch that ten hours every time you want to use the skill you’re acquiring, so you need to break the material down. Do this in whatever way feels natural. I prefer post-it notes and bullet points on pen and paper though.
Every chapter/video/whatever, you must summarise and write down the key facts and figures for. This means that at the end of the course you’ll know where everything is, and you’ll have a cliff’s notes version of the whole thing.
When it comes to online business courses, this is necessary because video training tends to be full of waffling and talking around the point so that the author can sell it as twelve hours versus ten hours.
As a couple of final points; you might have to consume the material twice to do this. Once to read/watch through, second to make notes. This’ll depend on the complexity of the material and how much you know of it already.
Also, this might seem a pain in the backside. It is. Taking notes and concentrating is tiring and time consuming. However, the more comprehensive your notes, the less likely you are to have to go through the course material again.
File this all away somewhere, you’re going to need it.
How To Remember Anything: Spaced Repetition Systems
There are two cognitive parts to learning stuff. Firstly, you need to learn it, as in, you need to grapple with the material until you understand it. (This will depend on what sort of thinker you are.)
The second part is that you need to transfer that new knowledge from your short term memory into your long term memory. The best way to do this is to use a spaced-repetition-based system.
Spaced Repetition Systems work like this.
You learn a new concept. Let’s say you learn that in French the adjective comes after the noun. Le Chien Noir. (The black god – or literally, the dog black.)
If you are unaware of this or don’t know either of those words, then the information will stick in your head for as long as it takes to be replaced by some other bit of data you don’t care about. It might be a few seconds, it might be a few minutes depending on how your brain works and what else is going on in your life at that time.
To transfer the knowledge from your short term memory to long term memory, you need to review the information at regular but increasing intervals.
So you might say to yourself:
Le chien noir. 1 second pause.
Le chien noir. 2 second pause.
Le chien noir. 5 second pause.
Then a ten second pause, thirty second pause, minute pause, two minutes pause, five, ten, thirty, hour, etc.
That’s essentially how to commit things to your memory effectively, and it works regardless of the type of information (thought it’s best you don’t try to memorise random facts – brains work in terms of connections between information.)
The Next Step
Let’s assume you’ve written some notes and you have committed the useful information to memory. Let’s also assume that you’ve got a folder or set of Word documents or whatever organised so that you can retrieve this information.
The next thing to do is test all of the information you’ve collected.
The only real way to remember, understand and engage with the materials you learn from is to use them. This is true whether you’re talking about “How to create a great photograph” or “The Philosophy of Plato.”
Assuming you’re working with something vocational, you need to just get on with it and tough through the learning stages until you’re proficient.
If you are working with something more esoteric like philosophy, you still need to do this step. If it’s something in the intellectual sphere, you need to test it out. Find scenarios in which you can put your new knowledge to use.
I read yesterday that Pokémon Go is prohibited by Islam. If someone has dedicated intellectual time and space to working that one out, then you should be able to work out why what you’re consuming is useful. If you can’t, then it’s time to find something else to learn from. This leads me onto my next point.
Don’t Be Afraid To Race Through The Process… Or Abandon It
This topic was prompted by my spending the morning going through a marketing course. It’s pretty useful as things go.
However, it’s supposed to be a six-week course. That’s assuming you watch one thirty to forty minute video a day. Providing you can concentrate, there’s no reason to do this. I’ve been watching a few for the past couple of days. It’ll take me until sometime next week to finish it, and I’ll have spent a week on a six-week course.
There are plenty of courses where you’ll have to set your own schedule. My general advice is to work on it for all the time you have free but only up until the point you can’t concentrate on it anymore. If you’re having to replay stuff or your note taking isn’t very comprehensive, then you’re probably not getting much from the materials and you should stop.
Finally… some courses are just dire. They’re a waste of time. If you’re watching an online tutorial and it’s an hour long and you’ve written nothing of any use after ten-fifteen minutes (and the structure doesn’t indicate it’s getting any better) then quit while you’re ahead. Close it, delete the bookmark or file, find better material. There’s no point in wasting your time and filling your head with diluted information.
Final Thoughts
This has been a bit of a detour article, but hopefully it’s helpful.
There’s a ton of information out there. A lot of it isn’t useful, and won’t ever be.
However, a lot of it can be useful. But it’ll only be useful if you learn the material and then use it effectively. This breaks down into three steps:
- Understand and record the material
- Commit it to your memory
- Synthesise it by using it.
Outside of the flash and whizz of gurus trying to sell you enhanced learning methods, that’s all there is to learning stuff. Now, go and learn!