> in an ideal manner when entirely self-directed
With all the resources available these days, including MOOCs, textbooks, syllabi, and recorded lectures from the best schools, there's a middle ground between "degree" and "entirely self-directed".
With all the resources available these days, including MOOCs, textbooks, syllabi, and recorded lectures from the best schools, there's a middle ground between "degree" and "entirely self-directed".
I would posit that using textbooks, syllabi, recorded lectures from the best schools and greatest professors, and documentation is still a form of self-direction. The learner is left entirely to their own direction, discipline, and environment. Perhaps the only thing that's changed in that list of wonderful resources since the 1960s is MOOCs. I thought of and considered these resources when writing my previous comment.
Perhaps I would have been best-advised to use a turn of phrase such as "self-directed with use of readily available non-instructor instructional resources". I thought such a phrase excessively clunky and unnecessary to make the point, but perhaps I was wrong.
I think this is one of the main problems of self-directled learning and why, in average, is not nearly as effective for most people unless they are incredibly motivated.
I just started playing with the idea that online collaborative learning can considerably reduce that pain and I just wrote and launched a little experiment to test it:
https://medium.com/@arielcamus/learn-to-build-a-backend-with...