Is learning online broken?

Last Update: 18.05.2018. By Jens in Developers Life | Learning | Newsletter

I read an interesting article and thought I’d share it with you. It is about the problem with online courses, but can also be applied to other material online, even tutorials. It’s talking about art classes as the author is an art instructor but the problem applies to other fields too. Art is interestingly close to coding. Try reading it and substitute art or design with code and I bet it still makes sense :-)

Anyways, her point is that information and information delivery is not everything and for learning it is more important to have a place and time to meet with people who are in the same boat as you; your course peers. Ignore her pitch at the end, the rest is still valid.

It’s something I’ve noticed too.

Information is free or cheap. You can go on the internet and try to learn Spring Boot for example and you find tons of thousands of free or paid tutorials, books, courses or whatever. You can learn. Yet, you are on your own. No teacher, no fixed place and time, no peers.

For some people, this works. For some not.

We have total freedom. This can be overwhelming.

I also noticed in my in-person training that it is not about the pure information. You could read it for free on the internet. But it is about having people at your side, who you can discuss with and ask questions. And learn from the experience of other, not only the teachers. And someone, who took out the complexity of the topic, so you can make progress. At the moment, because we are all together at the same time and place.

That’s totally missing in online courses. It’s usually a video of some person explaining or showing things and you watch it alone. You can’t ask the instructor nor your peers. There is no together. It is everyone lonely at home.

And when they feel lost because something is unclear, they get frustrated and some even angry and leave bad comments. Even so, the instructor/author/whatever states multiple times they can write in…

It’s the disconnects fault. Not the teachers nor the students.

What do you think? How many courses, book, etc have you bought but never finished? Why?