What's your solution to that? Enrolling into paid courses only? Approaching courses with a different mindset altogether?
If it is something that will help you achieve one of your most precious goals, then think about why you have that goal. Then when it's time to watch the next video, or do the next piece of homework, think of that reason. If you're mildly bored and don't have a compelling reason to keep going, you'll lose focus quickly. If you have that "why," you have a reason to keep making progress even if you're bored or tired.
A support group or even just an individual can also help. Get someone to take the course along with you, and there will be tons of benefits. You'll see that it's possible, you won't want to fall behind on conversations with your friend, and you will enjoy it more. Failing that, at the very least have an accountability partner who can help remind you of why you have this goal, and check up on you. Having someone call you up and ask "did you finish lesson 3 this week like you said you would?" can be a great motivator.
Those are all short-term tips. If you want information on how to increase your willpower overall, I recommend reading Kelly McGonigal's The Willpower Instinct, a very action-oriented scientific look at willpower.
If I could resume at my own pace, I'd have finished courses that I gave up on.
I wonder if this schedule is a carry over from how college courses are run. Perhaps there are those who need the discipline of a schedule. It'd have been nice to have a choice between a schedule as well as an "at your pace".
-create a linode, AWS or DO instance.
- Have trusted friend config wireless router to use new instance IP for DNS.
- Run modified nodejs dnsjack on new instance.
- Add my SmartMadre traffic control code to instance. Config oAuth or our APIanySite
- Now, code will cut off non allowed sites after X mins. SmartMadre code requires some amount of measurable progress to allow full internet back
- give trusted friend control of instance. You and friend could get email showing amount of daily progress.
- Suggestions welcome!
But you raise an important point. Doing it with a friend. It helps so much because you motivate eachother and there's also a bit of friendly competition and raising eachother's bar.
In my opinion, the challenges of self-teaching are to be able to study regularly over a longer period of time, and not only read/watch things but do exercises. Those things are enforced at school, but can be difficult to reproduce in a less constrained setting. For that, the MOOC are quite useful. My only grief is that I usually don't like the videos. I'd be happier with a book.
I'm usually listening to things while cleaning, driving, etc, for entertainment rather than maximizing learning. My experience has been that if someone introduces a really novel concept or historical fact in a talk, it will sink in and stick with me for a long time.
I've found a lot of fantastic material in this university's lectures- http://www.gresham.ac.uk/
I'm working on a search engine to curate a wider range of these, although it's still very much a work in progress-
There seems to be a bug with the filter on the left side: after you select one and the page reload, subsequent attempts to filter won't work.
I actually have been working on a similar kind of search engine, albeit being a more "proper" search engine + crawler combination rather than curation likes yours. It's great to see other works like yours for inspiration :-).
Would love the ability to search through these materials that are audio only.
I'm working on adding a feature so that every search result can be subscribed to as a podcast as well, so you can listen to everything on one topic by different people.
I'd love that podcast subscription capability, though listening to it in HTML5 means I can speed up the playback without having to download the audio file first (my podcast app, PocketCast, doesn't let me do this).
A while ago, I was thinking about doing a search engine on top of audio. The startup deepgram seemed to offer interesting tools, but didn't get a chance to play with it: https://www.deepgram.com/
Currently I have it searching transcripts, but I want to get machine transcriptions in as well, because it should work better how often someone says 'um', which I'm going to try as one of the ranking factors.
1. Set a clear goal, e.g "By the end of September I want to work through the course solve all the exercises".
2. Tell another friend what I'm doing and make a bet, every time I don't finish the weeks assignments in time I'll pay 50€.
3. Plan the evening before at what time I'm going to sit down and do this course.
I wonder when MOOC providers will start providing "study halls" using WebRTC video...
It worked in that I stuck with it, but the amount of time I spend on the original course didn't divide by two hours so I did also spend a little bit of time on another course.
/at this point I should clarify I am an unpaid shill for beeminder, not a paid one.
Coursera and all the others should focus on this part of the problem, not by asking for more money, that will just make them less likely to try again. Maybe calling the student after a few weeks of inactivity could be one way to help, another one may be to create and maintain local study groups (having free food is always a good incentive), another one is to be "paired" with another online student so you feel a little social pressure.
This is the biggest difference for me between courses that I have started and courses that I have finished. Meeting with someone in real life, even if it's just for an hour a week, easily creates the pressure to continue on that an email reminder simply doesn't do.