With the world of online learning absolutely booming and courses being produced left, right and centre, it can be hard to filter out good courses from bad ones. And if we’re going to invest our time and money into learning online, we want to make sure the investment is worth it.
So we’ve put together this guide to help you decide whether the course you’re thinking about taking will actually help you learn. Based on the latest research on how we learn, we’ve selected 9 different characteristics any good online course should have.
When choosing your next online course, refer to these principles to make sure you choose one that will actually help you learn!
1. A Clear Structure
Some online courses can be guilty of being too undirected. This could be by assigning a project with little guidance, presenting superficial information without explaining the context for it, or putting the onus on you to decide which information to study and learn.
The biggest issue with this can be explained by the Dunning-Kruger effect. Simply put, people often overestimate their ability in an area (for instance, driving ability or mathematical ability). When learning something new, we can overestimate how much we know and ignore gaps in our knowledge/understanding.
Without clearly structured learning, we can severely lead ourselves astray when trying to learn something new. Good courses will lay out a clear structure for us, allowing us to see what we are going to learn, why we are going to learn it and how it all fits together.
2. Clear guidance
Undirected courses also fail on providing adequate guidance. One of the most important things to consider when learning is our working and long-term memory.
We as people have a limited working memory – our ability to process new information as it is presented to us.
In order to learn effectively, we need to process things through working memory, and store them in our long-term memory. If our instruction is unguided and we have to figure out what to learn for ourselves, we can overload our working memory and as a result learn less – known as cognitive load theory.
Good online courses will filter out the majority of excess information, allowing us to process exactly what we need to learn to understand the subject.
Head here to learn about working memory and long-term memory in more detail.
3. An engaging learning environment
The idea of making teaching ‘engaging’ is often understood as making the teaching relevant to the learner. For instance, when we teach younger students, framing the lessons in the context of things like video games, sports or movies will help.
In actuality, this can distract the learner to thinking about those topics. If you love football and I teach you a concept through a football analogy, you are likely to drift off and start thinking about football.
It’s more important to simply create an engaging learning environment, and research suggests this can boil down to a few key things. Are the lessons organised, is the teaching style friendly and open, and is the presentation of the information awareness capturing?
We should prioritise taking courses which grab our attention, and limit distractions. We should also prioritise those courses giving us safe environments in which to learn, and those giving us confidence in our ability to learn.
4. Teaching the need-to-know facts
As seen above, the process of learning has a lot to do with memory formation. And when we have factual knowledge, we can remember more when processing new, related information.
In other words, in order to understand new content well, we need to have a good basic knowledge of the subject area we are studying.
Courses focusing on abstract ideas and concepts can be ineffective to learn something new. Good courses will make the facts we need to learn clear and central to the course, and will highlight the need to learn them as critical to the learning process.
5. Varying teaching methods
A common belief in the world of learning is people’s natural inclination to learn a certain way. Some people just learn best through text, others through images, and others through watching videos.
Research has shown this is wrong. Explorations into the effectiveness of multimedia learning (learning in different forms, e.g. text with images, videos with questions) have emphatically discovered that different topics, not people, are suited to different learning styles.
For instance, coding courses are more suited to coding examples than powerpoints, and processes are more suited to diagrams than plain text.
Good courses are made up by a variety of learning styles, each one suited best to what is being taught at any particular moment.
6. Allowing the chance to practice
Once you have managed to acquire some basic knowledge in the subject area you are learning (through guided learning with a focus on facts), it is extremely important to put what you have learned into practice. Plenty of evidence confirms the role of targeted and active practice is crucial to developing expertise.
Good courses will not only give you the chance to practice, but will take complex ideas and boil them down into small, practicable chunks. By allowing you to repeatedly train in small, specific areas of understanding, good courses give you the framework to build deep knowledge in an effective way.
7. Testing you on material learned
One of the most well-known theories in memory is Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve. He found you forget the majority of information you’ve learned over a period as short as 9 hours. This can be overcome by spaced out practice – by revisiting content and testing it on yourself over a prolonged period of time, you are more likely to retain more of the information.
Courses only presenting us with information are not well designed to help us retain it. Instead, we should find courses regularly testing our understanding, and especially courses repeatedly testing our understanding of the same content, to embed the knowledge being taught.
8. Adapting to your needs/
knowledge level
People are designed to gain pleasure from solving problems. Research has even shown people can release dopamine when they learn something new and solve a new problem – the same chemical is released when we do other pleasurable things like watch our favourite shows or eat good food.
People are therefore naturally inclined to want to solve problems. However, this desire can fade when the problem is too easy, or too hard. If we don’t feel challenged by a problem, we won’t feel the same pleasure from solving it. If the problem is too hard, the effort to solve it isn’t worth the pleasure we’ll get from solving it.
We all learn at different speeds and pick up information in different ways – this comes from the different levels of background knowledge we all have. Courses assuming the same level of knowledge and learning for all learners can present us with learning that is too easy, or too hard, and therefore not engaging.
Courses offering different routes for learning depending on how we interact with the course are more likely to keep us engaged, and support us in learning in a personalised and suitable way.
9. Good interaction from the instructor
Although learning is moving more and more online, we are still humans, and humans are primarily social animals. Studies on how children learn determine the need for human interaction as crucial for learning.
If we cannot discuss ideas with others, ask questions on content, and interact with teachers over what we learn, we will naturally find it harder to pick up new content.
A lot of online courses are simply uploaded, and forgotten by the instructor. Good courses have high levels of instructor/student interaction, and provide spaces for learners and teachers to interact with each other in the form of Q&A pages, forums and live sessions.
Conclusion
There are tons of great online courses out there, but also tons of rubbish ones. To help you decide which course to spend your time and money on, we’ve summarised the points above into this handy list of questions you can ask of any online course:
That’s a lot of ways to filter out bad courses! We realise it can be hard to know where to start when doing this kind of analysis, let alone find the time to do it.
Here’s where we come in.
How Pyxium can help
At Pyxium, we believe in the inherent value of learning. That’s why for every question you answer right on a Pyxium course, you create and earn ‘pyxies’.
What are pyxies?
Pyxies are units of a virtual currency that you use to buy things in the Pyxium marketplace, like books, subscriptions, online courses and more!
Check out this blog post explaining what we do in a bit more detail, and register to get involved!
