Mistakes In Online Learning

During the uncertain and unpredictable times of pandemic traditional learning still remains a dream that curious students can only dream about. The circumstances continue to dictate us with new, comforting yet more difficult rules of the game, where to be a part of the course you have the option to be present only virtually. To use these pitfalls to your advantage it is crucial to be aware of the following main widespread mistakes. Whether it is a format of a Zoom conference, a YouTube lection, an online course or your personal research.

1. Taking The Information at Face Value

The only way to truly get the knowledge has nothing to do with believing everything you hear or read. To succeed at online (and any other type of) learning you have to stay within the constant doubting, double-, and even triple-checking mentality at all times. Questioning the information of your educational source will help you to achieve better and much deeper results since it will prevent you from getting fooled by illusional, subjective thinking. In the long term perspective this mindset will constantly add up to your wisdom.

2. Being Shy to Ask Questions

Another integral part of fruitful educational progress comes down to asking your teachers nuanced questions about anything that you feel ambiguous about. It doesn’t have to be nominated for “The World’s Most Deep, Interesting and Fascinating Question Award”. It can be as simple as “what’s the name of the author of this work?” or “were any other people who conducted the similar studies?” or “does this software has a simpler analog?”, etc.

If your desire to get the most out of your question pushes you to go to the next level of Q&A – you can always start a discussion on the corresponding page of Reddit. Yes, in some cases people from the comment section may backfire at you with their arrogance and blame you for not knowing the basics of something that is literally the meaning of their whole existence. But in reality, it will only strengthen your memory of the subject

The most important thing about these types of discussions is that you have to always keep in mind that you came there to primarily get the knowledge, not to argue. Of course, you can argue! It can exercise your ability to search for information to win the dispute, or accept that you were wrong, if you have every reason to do that. You can’t forget about the necessity to stay on scientifical point. Otherwise, you will succumb to temptation to win the argument no matter what, and instead of getting closer to the truth, you will get further from it only to win or to bother your conversational opponent.

3. “I Can Look It Up Anytime” Mentality

Unfortunately, or luckily, we are not living in times when people learn books word by word. The 24/7 internet excess relaxes our minds and frees us from the obligation to memorize anything we find useful. But when it comes down to learning – memorizing key categories and principles is a must. Writers of cheapwritingservice.com state that it is also important to differentiate things that have to be remembered from things there is actually no point to waste time on, such as all of the numbers, complete biographies of the scientists, names of the schools they graduated from, or anything in between.

4. Absence Of Note-Taking Routine

Not typing and especially writing down the information during the online course is one of the most harmful habits the present generation inherited from the facts described in the previous paragraph. The practice of taking notes is just as important as repeating the moves a coach teaches you during the training. Although it is not the same, it implies the pretty similar value to productivity of your educational journey.

5. Absence of Note Reading Routine

Among those who do type the information down there are plenty of people who forget getting back to it. Revising the material is a textbook “learning.” And needless to say, not taking time to revise the material is one the biggest and probably the most common errors students can make.

Oftentimes people mistakenly choose to receive more information instead of coming back to material they looked at only once. Their worldview can be described as “now I’ve heard it, so reading or hearing it again is a waste of my time.” The failure of this strategy comes down to the fact that human memory works by not the same principle as digital memory. Only because we can always pull up the information that we store in our external drive, computer, phone or cloud doesn’t mean that we can do the same trick with our brain. And since our lifestyle besides learning includes such things as relationships with other people, work, hobbies and household stuff – we don’t use every bit of this new knowledge on a regular basis. And unlike in aforementioned storages, after a certain point our brain erases certain memories by itself.

We can achieve much greater results if we come back to revise what we already learned, to see if it matches with newer data. The goal is to make a revising habit a part of our thinking machine. Not to store a factual trash that is regularly being displaced with other unchecked factual trash to infinity.

6. Not Using the Acquired Knowledge in Practice

Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics Albert Einstein once stated “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.” And that is coming from the world-class scientist, whose “Theory of Relativity” everyone heard of but a minority can talk about.

To increase the probability of remembering the material (ideally) you have to re-create the experiments you were told about and share it with other people.

If experiments are too costly – find the similar ones that were done by other people and see if the results are matching. If there is no such option – talk about it with someone. If a perfect moment arises, share this information with your partner, family members or your friends. That way, you will have the emotional attachment to it, and thus, there will be more chances of it saving in your memory.