Free Online Courses

There are so many to choose from. https://www.coursera.org/browse?languages=en https://www.edx.org/course?course=all What are some courses you're interested in lainons?

I signed up for the astronomy classes a few years ago, but never went through with it

I completed a couple of them. They are good if you have self discipline. It helps if you have someone with whom you can talk about the topics youre studying. One of the most valuable courses I did was called learning how to learn or some thing like that. Ill share what works for me. >the pomodoro technique Trying to work on something while thinking about the totality of what must be acomplished is discouraging and promotes procrastination. Dividing the task into smaller pieces that can be completed in 30-45 minutes makes it easier. Take short breaks in between work sessions and take a longer break after 4 sessions. >Deliberate practice Pretty obvious, but its good to have this in the conscious mind: Practice the things you find hard. If you dont understand something then read about it, try to say in your own words what a paragraph means before moving on. If you dont understand then switch tasks and return later. This is how I learned matrix multiplication. It took me like 4 tries to understand what was going on, it was frustrating at first, but really gratifying later. >Interleaving Studying topics in an interleaved way. This is helpful because you train the "loading" of the topic into your brain. The more you do things the better you are at doing them. Repeatedly loading a topic into memory makes it easier to remember later.

>>6984 re: Pomodoro technique - you can take this further with a technique called timeboxing. Learned this while studying Japanese. There are many different strategies you can use by setting your own time periods, or nesting timeboxes within other timeboxes. e.g. - if I really cbf to study, I will use very short timeboxes (1 or 2 minutes). - If I'm feeling distracted today, I use 5 min timeboxes. That way if I get distracted, I will be distracted for no longer than 4 minutes before the timer snaps me out of it. Divide and conquer. You will piss your housemates off with the endlessly ringing timers though. Khatzumoto wrote an extensive timeboxing series on the AJATT blog.