Why learning paths are important?
Learning Paths are your saviour in an era of data overload
In less than two decades we have moved from the problem of “Lack of content” to “Data overload”. As you can see in the image the query “What is blockchain” throws up 24,40,00,000 results. How can somebody scout through these results and decide what is best? It is almost impossible. So what we do is we pretty much rely on some cues like
- Google : If it is on the first page of Google it has to be good.
- Social : If some content is shared by somebody you trust, then it should be good.
- Curation : If your favourite curator has shortlisted it, then it should be good.
https://twitter.com/@google identified the problem of identifying the right content from the large amount of data available on internet and they are still reaping the benefits of the same.
https://facebook.com identified the importance of social cues and they have built a social networking mammoth where people share content that is relevant to them.
https://medium.com understood the importance of curation of genuine content by authors who are professionals in their field and @medium has a global rank of 243 based on traffic.
Learning Paths
Today there are many search engines which can throw up relevant answers to your pointed questions. But the current problem is that a learner is not aware of all the right questions that he should ask. So predefined learning paths make it easier for the learner to understand what he knows and what he doesn’t know. A learning path gives clear path, so that the learner can realise where exactly he stands.
Most of the learning websites have already realised this. Just run a quick google search for the pages that have learning-paths in their urls and you will realise that most of the learning portals are warming up to this idea.
Websites making use of learning paths
Coursera
Though there were so many free learning materials available online Coursera showed that structured learning is still critical for learners. They pretty much built their product around video content that is structured.
In addition to that Coursera introduced learning paths. https://blog.coursera.org/new-coursera-start-finish-learning-paths-starting-new-career/ They realised that most of the times people have a broad learning path in their mind unconsciously and helping them navigate that is critical for their adoption.
Lynda
Lynda.com has been in the online learning domain probably for the longest time. Recently they were acquired by LinkedIn. Lynda has added learning paths on their site — https://www.lynda.com/learning-paths They have even added learning paths on their home page.
AWS
AWS today has so many services that there is a learning industry centred around just teaching AWS. Even AWS has learning paths in the training part of their website. https://aws.amazon.com/training/learning-paths/
Notable Others
Oracle (https://education.oracle.com/learning-paths/all_paths) and Atlassian(https://training.atlassian.com/learning-paths) are just a few others who are stressing on learning paths. One thing that we have observed is that with the explosion of content and tutorials learning paths will very soon become ubiquitous and a required feature rather than a good to have feature.
In the previous sections you would have observed that all these website allow you to create learning paths within their websites only. For learners to really leverage the power of internet they should be able to create learning paths across the whole of internet. Learning Paths product intends to do that :)
Learning Paths Product
Need for “lifelong learning” cannot stressed enough in today’s world where change is the only constant. With the duration of each change cycle reducing as we go forward, only those who are nimble and are life long learners will be able to stay relevant. Today there is a huge gap in the tooling for life long learners as they have a healthy mix of rabbit holes and learning paths that they partake in. We are addressing this gap and we are building a suite of tools that will help the lifelong learners leverage their unique strengths. The first tool that we have already released is a chrome extension called Highlights. The chrome extension lets you highlight text as you read, make notes, add tags. The dashboard lets your search through all your previous highlights and notes.
Do check our extension and provide us the feedback. We are open to feature requests as well. Just drop a comment to this post.
