MOOCs and the Rise of the School of Four

Being ambitious about learning a variety of subjects and having the opportunity to do so in 2012, I enrolled in several free online courses (MOOCs). I found thousands of people like myself here. Udacity and Coursera (and now edX) are like oases for the lifelong learners and knowledge seekers. Free, high quality education that can be accessed from anywhere! Unlike traditional courses, there isn't one definite classroom or college where people can gather, find friends and study together. Instead, the world is one global classroom!

People from almost every country are enrolled in these courses. There is a lot of hustle-bustle within the discussion forums on the course sites, where peers can share their ideas related to the course and solve one another's doubts. But facebook turns out to be the best place to connect with your peers since almost everyone taking online courses is on facebook and it is by design a place to socialize. Almost every course has a facebook group. People taking the same courses socialize with their classmates from all over the world on facebook. Besides the course-specific groups, there are some more general groups like OpenEducation, CompScisters, CompSciblings and STEM MOOC Hangout.

Design for the CompScisters Group

Owing to this global excitement, new networks of people have begun forming. People taking MOOCs not only receive world-class education for free but also get to experience the borderless global village that the world is becoming. Where ideas and emotions are upheld over nationality, race and age. Its the beginning of a new era where free global education unites people from all over the world.

But all is not well in the world of MOOCs. A major bulk of the students who enroll in the MOOCs do not complete the courses. The main reason must be that these courses are free. So the registrations are done more out of curiosity than with a determination and planning of pursuing till the end . Even then, the absolute number of students who are genuinely interested in learning and completing the courses is also huge. Why then do such students also face problems in completing the courses? Over-enrollment can be one reason. Since many courses offered by Coursera and edX follow a schedule, students cannot handle more than a certain number of courses at once. Currently, the number of active courses are around 30 from Coursera and 7 from edX. And inspite of the courses at Udacity are self-paced and always available, people are unable to complete them as they are busy meeting the deadlines of the courses from Coursera and edX. They think of completing the Udacity courses once they get a break from the courses with deadlines. As can be expected, the number of pending courses keeps rising and the joy of learning is quickly replaced by anxiety of not having enough time to complete them all.

This is a case of greed, bad time management and setting of unrealistic goals by enrolling in too many courses. On the contrary, if one takes too few courses, one might miss out the good ones that could have been pursued with just a little improvement in one's time management skills. The solution is to choose and pursue an optimum set of courses according to your interest and time availability. With the common goal of bringing in sanity to this endeavor of MOOC learning in which a lot of people all over the world are investing a lot of time, energy and aspirations, we formed the School of Four.

Dharav has a lot of effective ideas about productivity, time-management and good habit formation by design rather than force. He is greatly inspired by David Allen (Getting Things Done). He has already tested many techniques on his own learning before- use of speed reading, mindmaps for taking notes, making lists of things to do and gamifying the tasks by setting short term goals and giving points as per his performance on those tasks. He keeps telling us that "some things are easier done than imagined" and so, we should use simple and effective tactics that help us to accomplish things. We often spend a lot of time just planning or worrying about things, while once we start doing them, they can be accomplished quickly! Breaking the bigger tasks into smaller, manageable chunks and setting appropriate due dates for them can be very effective.


The following are the major things learnt from Dharav at the School of Four that I have recently adopted:

1) 'Getting Things Done' using Trello
You are anxious- there are so many things to accomplish! With numerous things on your mind, it becomes difficult to focus on one task and do well in it. This only leads to piling up of more pending tasks and increasing anxiety. That's because you are not keeping enough room in your mind to actually do the work. Clear your mind by listing down all the things that you need to do. For this, we are using Trello, a free online tool that is great for the planning and tracking of tasks- whether personal or collaborative. For a more comprehensive coverage on the utility of Trello, check out Dharav's post (coming soon)

2) Superbetter's Resilience Buildup
There's a complete game-like tool Superbetter developed by Jane McGonigal, which helps us to achieve any personal goal by increasing our personal resilience which is of four types- Physical, Mental, Emotional and Social. I'm not using the complete interface currently, but employing the tips for resilience building.

3) Scott Young's Timelogging
I use a diary to log down the time whenever I start a new activity. I can go back to it at the end of the day and see how much time I spent on worthwhile activities and how much got wasted. This information is very crucial in setting of tasks based on the times when one is most productive, and can indicate if a particular habit needs to be corrected. More on this later.

4) Shawn Achor's Happiness Advantage
Are you doing what you love? If yes, then you are on the right track, and instead of worrying about the huge amount of work to be accomplished, focus on enjoying it. Using the above techniques, its very simple to set clear and manageable goals, maintain your resilience, watch where you are wasting time and where you should be giving more time and enjoy what you are doing!

Learning: Distractions and Addictions

One picture is worth a thousand words

Yes, editing this pic still remains!

This picture says it all. And it is universal.

That blissful state of learning something new is addictive, it is empowering. (Most college students, unfortunately, have no idea of this state of life.) Why then, have the four of us not done awesome things in the last six months that we have known MOOCs?

Distractions. We go through them, they keep us away from that addictive state, and that addictive state does not build up. It does not let the addiction overpower the distractions and sedentary states, which in turn keeps the addiction controlled.

It's a textbook negative feedback loop, one that keeps a system stable. Except that in this case, it is keeping the system in a state that is undesirable!

Our story is no different from the story of the human race.

Distractions, Anxiety and Boredom

We, all of us, want to get a lot of things done. We want to do them. We really want to do them. We wake up in the morning and we don't even realize that it's afternoon already. We sit down and try to get something done, but we get distracted.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

By night time, we want to sleep and start over again, in hope that all's not lost, that there's another tomorrow. We don't remind ourselves that we have no plan for making tomorrow different than today.

All the while we tell lies to ourselves that time wasted enjoying is not time wasted, paying no heed to the fact that a life wasted in waiting for tomorrows is indeed a life wasted.

We really want to be addicted to the courses. There's no need of "want.". One eventually does get addicted to learning, partly because learning is part of living. 

We often walk through our days unaware and out of touch with our emotional lives. Our inattention makes us constantly bounce between two extremes: during much of the day we live filled with the anxiety and pressures of our work and obligations, while during our leisure moments, we tend to live in passive boredom.

The key, according to Csikszentmihalyi, is to challenge ourselves with tasks requiring a high degree of skill and commitment. It's more than just procrastination in learning. It is the story of our lives.

There's one thing that bothers me though. Passive boredom these days does not happen so much. It results into greater distractions. All you have to do is log on to Facebook and plug into the plethora of posts that seek your attention. Just to keep it. To Hijack it, with your own willingness, so that you may not be able to do anything good with it.

So that you are no longer able to face your own lack of management skills and control over life. So that no matter how much of a rebel you are, you are unable to do anything except accept the status quo of today, finding false hope in a tomorrow where you will do 15 courses, or exercise to your heart's desire or practice cricket from Dusk to Dawn.

The answers

Imagining living in a Nazi concentration camp in your head might not lead to such a great sinking feeling that the above two paragraphs that might have caused you.

But you don't have to accept this state of affairs. All you need to do is realize something. Your time slips out from your hand because you don't know it's slipping by. You keep doing things that you kept doing because you have no idea that you have a choice - a choice between being the same as before and saying no to letting time go as you sit down and engage your brain in a focused activity.

Young finished MIT CS in 51 weeks

Yes, you keep doing it because you have no idea you keep doing it. So, the answer becomes simple. There's an anticlimax here. The somewhat ultra-realistic tone of this post will give way to a geeky solution.

The solution lies in Timelogging. Next post is about how we will implement it. We were introduced to timelogging by someone who finished 33 MIT courses in 51 weeks flat.

In the meanwhile, you can (but we insist you do) read about Timelogging here on Scott Young's Blog.

Everyone looks like a geek while doing awesome stuff!

The Two Ted Talks introduced here:

TEDxEastsidePrep - Scott Young - Can you get an MIT education for $2,000?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=piSLobJfZ3c 

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Flow, the secret to happiness

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXIeFJCqsPs

The time spent on this Blog would pay dividends if....

1. You have understood what we wanted to say about our daily life patterns
2. You have watched Scott Young's video and wondered if a Business Student can do this then why can't a Science student do it?
3. You will mull over Prof. Mihaly's work on Flow, Optimal experience and Creativity
4. Most importantly, you have found the importance of timelogging.