Online Courses Taught Me More Than 7 Years In University
And they didn’t cost me a penny
The real learning for me started when I got out of university. That’s when I gained a thirst for knowledge I yearned for, and only dreamt of in college.
Cramming to pass exams
At times I thought I spent too much time partying and not enough time buried into my text books. But the more this hunger for learning grows within me the more I know this has come from something else. Something has changed since I left college to foster this craving for information.
My 7 years in college (I changed direction a few times) were full of drifting.
I would go between classes learning what I needed to pass my exams. I would then scrub that knowledge from my brain to make room for next semesters material. It involved lots of late night cramming and amazing feats of short term memory. It was a system that worked, but was in no way rewarding.
Don’t get me wrong, when a topic was interesting I learned a lot. I broke out of my cramming routine, I’d attentively listen and read, even doing my own research. These were the things which made college a pleasure. I remember a series of biology labs where we spliced a gene into a strain of bacteria. Or lectures on time dilation and black holes. Fascinating stuff but it’s not exactly something I can find a quick use for now a days.
Hardly worth the time
The things I do now in my day to day are all computer science related with maths and physics thrown into the mix. In college I studied everything from statistics to assembly language to quantum mechanics. These classes instilled the same lust for learning in me, but never managed to satiate it. It always left me crying out for more.
The classes acted as primers, I could see exactly where what we were learning would lead me, but we never went there. It always fell short and the class would be over and it would be onto the next topic. I would fumble around to continue learning and satisfy that craving. But of course I wouldn’t have the time to spare to go on learning in my spare time as new exams loomed.
Honestly though, my core curriculum comprised of these primers and turned out useless. Nothing I learned in any of my computer science modules is something I use today. There were snippets in advanced classes which came in handy, less than 5% of the material. The rest of the advanced classes stopped too soon.
A prime example of this is when I had a module in web development thought over 12 weeks. Juggling 7 other classes it was never going to be possible to deep dive into this topic like it deserved. And yet, after college, I’ve managed to learn far more in 4 weeks through online courses.
A more thorough approach
I find myself doing this a lot more lately, filling in the holes in my education with online courses. A perfect example, I needed some extra statistics skills to analyse a big data set for an app I was making. My solution? Go online and do a quick course in the stats I needed, not like a one size fits many college course I had experienced.
I’ve found online courses to be far better than most classes I took in university for many reasons. The obvious one being the accessibility. I can learn from the comfort of my own home, whenever I want, at my own pace. With the ability to play back lessons at your leisure, falling behind isn’t a problem. Online classes don’t suffer with the same pacing issues as college classes.
Outside of university distraction is minimal. Without being forced into classes I don’t care for (here’s looking at you Calculus IV) things become much easier. After leaving college I knew what direction to take. I opted to start taking a Udacity course in android development. I learned more in a week in that class than I did in an entire module in university. Not only did find it more fast paced but it was directly applicable.
Personally, I think this self driven, hunger for learning is something you don’t have time for in college. It’s not something that is in your control. You soon come across something you have zero interest in but must learn to progress. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to have to deal with all this “filler” content in a degree program. It’s time that would have been much better spent specialising in what interested me more.
It’s unfair to say all the modules I took taught me nothing, but I revised a lot of them a second time after college. Usually I’d learn a lot more the second time over too. I guess this is because I can give it my undivided focus as I’m not juggling other classes. I’ve since gone on to teach myself things I was never exposed to in college.
I was lucky to study things like quantum mechanics, bioinformatics and evolutionary biology. While these classes fascinated me, they were of course, a waste of time from a career point of view.
I still read about these topics in my spare time out of love for Science. I love learning about the weird and wonderful of our universe, but I won’t be sitting an exam in it. If there’s complex equations I don’t grasp, that’s okay I don’t have to. This frees me up to appreciate the subject as a hobby and not burn mental energy on struggling to learn it.
I question sometimes if all I went to college for was a fancy piece of paper that costs thousands. I’ve managed to learn more material, with greater comprehension, in a fraction of the time since leaving.
