Foundations: Add new `Effective Learning Techniques` section, move learning techniques content to it, and collaborate to add more content about curriculum HOT 11 OPEN

I feel that might be something that can easily be interpreted as taking the curriculum in a non-linear order. The curriculum is designed to be a followed linearly, and to narrow your focus to the road TOP takes you down. While I get where you're coming from with the interleaving specifically, I think a more practical issue people face is misaligned expectations of how well you need to "understand" things before moving on/facing projects etc.

A common problem we face is people believing they're expected to know how to solve projects from memory when they get to them, i.e. treating projects as tests of knowledge, instead of playgrounds to get practical experience (where understanding actually starts to occur). That's why they often spend hours trying to memorise documentation, seeking every resource under the sun to make sure they "master" the topic before approaching the projects, writing their own documentation for revision purposes like preparing for an exam etc.

Instead, people start to improve leaps and bounds when they realise that's not the expectation, and that awareness of concepts as per the lessons is sufficient to approach projects to practise (and start learning) those concepts and techniques. Fully aware and accepting they will forget some things, will continue to struggle but have their focus in a better and more manageable position.

And I'm not sure we need to dive into interleaving or similar for that, especially when I feel it's easy for people to think they should jump around and do this lesson now, that lesson in a bit, come back to the project amd doing lessons ahead etc.

Bear in mind this is just my personal opinion, so I'm interested in the opinions of others on the team.

Note: If Carlos' article about not memorising stuff isn't in that lesson or somewhere in the curriculum, it really should be.

from curriculum.

Nothing to apologise for!

I feel like the "mindset" part of the title can include the "learning to learn" concepts, and I'm wondering if instead of extracting out to a completely separate lesson, if you perhaps might have an idea for an improvement to the lesson title?

I say that primarily because I think for what we want to go for, the current lesson structure and contents is mostly fine as it is, and I'm not sure we really need a separate lesson.

@TheOdinProject/maintainers Any thoughts on this?

from curriculum.

Thank you for making this issue.

Gonna ping our @TheOdinProject/foundations team to get opinions on these additions.

from curriculum.

Thank you for making this issue.

Gonna ping our @TheOdinProject/foundations team to get opinions on these additions.

Thank you. Just some additional info -- I'm having doubts about the extent of my suggestions. The content might be entirely sufficient right now. I never actually read the Motivation and Mindset lesson until recently, because it was added after I started TOP, but made the decision not to revisit the newly added Foundations content, which is probably a big part of why my learning technique is so terrible. That flow chart looks like it could be extremely useful. So the actual content might be entirely sufficient.

I still like idea of separating out the learning techniques into a separate lesson or section though. Maybe the other suggestions are still valid too. I'll await your guys' advice.

from curriculum.

Personally, I think the original proposal specifically is a little much. That's coming from a an angle of "we're a web dev curriculum first and foremost, not a course aimed at teaching you the science and research backing up specific learning techniques". As in, if it would be valuable to make readers aware of certain things, it'd be to become aware of the techniques as suggestions, as opposed to diving into the science behind those techniques.

Also if we put ourselves in the shoes of a learner starting the curriculum, you'd need to find a balance between being made aware of valuable information, and overloading with stuff that's just too much at that point for us as new learners.

Frankly, a lot of learners just won't care (for better or for worse) and will want to get started with programming stuff, not read additional lessons on the details behind multiple different learning techniques that honestly just take time and experience to figure out for yourself. IMO, if someone's sincere about their learning, they'd likely come across and try different learning techniques at some point in their journey.

Perhaps there could be a little restructuring of that lesson to make it easier to digest and provide additional valuable information (I think some of the paragraphs can have line breaks added for easier reading). But I'm not sure the extent of a whole new large section/lessons on learning techniques is appropriate for a web dev curriculum, as opposed to an education-studies curriculum or something like that.

If a few individual resources/topics are missing from the lesson and would provide significant value being inserted, I'd definitely support that.

from curriculum.

@MaoShizhong

I agree. How about something like this as a minimal addition? A simple image that shows blocked and interleaved practice side by side. Not necessarily this one, but one like it.

I feel like with a better image and description than I'm providing now, it could be very intuitively clear why the interleaving is superior.

For example, if I have a test in a week, it makes more sense to immediately cover all topics on the first day, and again on the next days, rather than try and spread out the topics across the week in blocks. So there seems to be a kind of timing advantage that's clearly apparent. I think even without there being a deadline or test, the principle applies.

Also there's the psychological benefit of not doing the same thing all day.

I feel like the principle is related to how TOP gives you reading assignments from multiple sources. Attacking a problem from multiple angles.

from curriculum.

Fair enough, the prescribed lesson order is likely best.

However, if I understand it correctly, the principle doesn't have to apply to topics. Activities count as well.

So like, a basic example would be doing coding and docs reading today, rather than just reading docs. Enhances learning.

I don't necessarily have my heart set on it being included, I just feel like it might be important for people to know. I say that mainly because I have the feeling that I've wasted enormous amounts of time by not doing this.

It's also covered already in the Additional Resources section (the Learning How to Learn course). Maybe just bumping that up to the assignment could be option.

I hope I'm not coming across as argumentative. I have no problem with anyone's opinion being different than mine :)

from curriculum.

I actually think the current lesson covers enough of what I'd consider "necessary". A lot of the bigger general issues people face with self-learning include the most basic things like not taking breaks, thus trying to do too much in one go, making things get real dry real quick. Since the curriculum has been structured how it is due to a lot of careful thought, I'm personally hesitant for any of our lessons to plant ideas that could lead to people deviating from the course structure for any reason. I personally think if people are finding things a bit dry, they'd be better of taking a break, and coming to terms with the fact that not everything might be the most interesting/fun/engaging etc.

The lesson already touches on a good amount of the growth mindset, time management, common pitfalls etc. that I believe are sufficient to get a main point across. People can and will develop their learning technique over time and experience, as with any other skill.

Personally, I would prefer people to stick to the curriculum structure, and if people sincerely feel any parts of the curriculum will be better done a slightly different way (e.g. variety of resources, exercises or whatever), then they should be raised as suggestions for the curriculum itself. That way if the team ultimately agrees on that suggestion, everyone benefits :D

The Coursera "Learning how to learn" course is actually mentioned in the assignment. The assignment has a 17m video introducing the course and discussing it. I think that's more than sufficient for an actual assigned resource. The assignment point does say the course itself is linked in the additional resource.

Given that course is "a few hours long" (at least going by their course site), it doesn't feel the most appropriate to actually enforce as an assigned thing to do in this scenario.

(Also not viewing any of this as argumentative, rather just fostering productive discussion).

from curriculum.

Fair enough. Apologies for overlooking the lesson content before writing the issue.

If I could narrow it to a single suggestion, it would be the idea of separating out the 'learning to learn' content from the motivational content, on the basis that a lesson title should fully describe the contents of the lesson. That'd mean creating an additional lesson or modifying the title.

from curriculum.

if you perhaps might have an idea for an improvement to the lesson title?

Motivation, Mindset, and Learning Strategies, or any other title that explicitly conveys the content.

With the current title, no student who is viewing this page for the first time will know that the lesson contains detailed instructions on how to study TOP until they open it. Some people skip. Other people, like myself, started before the lesson was ever introduced, and made the decision to continue rather than revisit newly added Foundations content.

from curriculum.

I wouldn't be opposed to updating the lesson title, but something to keep in mind is that we do tell users that the curriculum is meant to be taken in order, without skipping. If a user skips a lesson then that will be on them. Likewise if a user opts to not complete newly added lessons.

That said, if in this case it's less that a new lesson was added, but new content was added to an existing lesson, it may not be clear whether that new content is significant or not if the lesson title itself doesn't change. So a user may not know to even revisit such a lesson (even if the lesson's completion state was reset; that isn't inherently indicative that new content was added to the lesson, just that something caused the completion state to reset).

from curriculum.