Last update: Tuesday 2/27/28
Dr. Oakley, TercherPerigee (her publisher), and Coursera (her MOOC platform) all know that there are a lot more of "them" out there than there are of "us"; so the blurbs about who should read her book or take her MOOC are mostly directed at "them" in order to sell more copies and enroll more students. Nevertheless, the last page of her book's first chapter lets the cat out of the bag: "If you're already good at numbers or science, the insights of this book help make you even better." Indeed, they do ... (Note: Bold and italic font in the author's original text.)
I've always had some good study habits; so I've always been a good student. So I was already aware of at least half of the tactics and strategies that Dr. Oakley proposes. However truth be told, I have only been using about half of that half in my studies -- enough to earn As again and again, but those As were harder to earn than they should have been.
I enrolled in her MOOC; then I bought her book. The MOOC recommended the book, but it was not required reading. But reading the book as the MOOC progressed enabled me to learn a lot more from the MOOC than otherwise.
I was simultaneously enrolled in two other MOOCs in math and data science while taking taking Dr. Oakley's course, so I took the opportunity to apply her recommended practices to my efforts to master the materials in the other courses. I emphasized the tactics and strategies from the "other" half, the half of her recommended practices of which I had been ignorant before encountering her book and her course ... and I was amazed by how well they worked.
For example, I have employed some practices that Dr. Oakland blows away as grossly inefficient, the chief being my tendency to re-read materials again and again in order to achieve mastery through "over learning". After three weeks of consistently pausing every few pages to recall what the text had just stated or pausing at various points in a video to recall what the instructor had just said, I realized that this method of mastery was vastly superior to merely re-reading the course text or re-viewing its videos.
The New York Times article cited in the first paragraph of this note makes a snarky comment that Coursera would not disclose how many students out of the 1.8 million who enrolled had actually completed Dr. Oakley's MOOC. This is a classic example of educational innovations being discussed by reporters who have no idea what they are talking about. We all know that less than ten percent of enrollees complete most MOOCs. This "low" percentage has serious negative implications for some kinds of courses, but not for Dr. Oakley's.
Her fundamental goal is to get her students to change the way they learn, i.e., to change their study habits. Her course only lasts four weeks on the calendar. I suggest that four weeks is less than half of the time most students would need to even try half of the many new practices she recommends. As she points out, one of the "illusions of competence" is understanding what an author or an instructor has said. In the case of Dr. Oakley's MOOC, the real measure of mastery is not passing all of the quizzes and exams; it's replacing one's old, ineffective study habits with more effective habits. That takes lots of time and lots of practice.
Full disclosure requires that I admit that I read the book and completed the course, earning my usual "A", a 99% to be precise. But for this kind of course that's a booby prize. I completed the course because completing MOOCs is one of my newer bad habits. Twenty-twenty hindsight makes it clear to me that completing this kind of MOOC within four weeks was about as sensible as tasting every kind of wine and every kind of cheese sold by a new wine and cheese shop within four weeks. How many good chunks of cheese and how many fine glasses does one have to taste before one decides that this is a really great wine and cheese shop, a place to come back to again and again???
I would have made better use of my time by dropping out midway through the course and text. Then I should have taken as many weeks as necessary to slowly read the rest of the book while "tasting" every new practice the good doctor recommended ... and practicing the ones that worked best for me until they became second nature. So this is what I have to do now. Now that the course is over, now is when my real learning will begin.
As per the title of this note, I highly recommend the MOOC and its book to data scientists. Why? Because data science is developing so rapidly that data scientists can easily be overwhelmed by the vast amount of new knowledge they have to master. Nevertheless 24 hours in every day remains a fixed constraint. So the trick is not to study harder or longer, but to study smarter. Dr. Oakley's recommendations and the learning science on which they are based offer proven procedures for learning faster and for achieving deeper understanding.
Roy L Beasley, PhD
DLL Editor
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