Look at the Numbers

First, you’ve got to get real.  The odds are that you will not reach your goal.

What?  How bad can it be?  Well, let’s look at some data from a free MIT class that is available on the MIT OpenCourseWare site.  The class 6.00 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming is one of their most popular, and it includes YouTube videos of each lecture.

Now, if we go to the YouTube channel page for the class and plot the number of video views by the lecture number, we get a sad result:

The last lectures only have about 2% – 3% of the views that the first lecture has.  That’s quite a drop-off.  I’m going to assume that there is a correlation between video views and the number of people who progress through the class.  If so, then out of all those people who intended to learn that class, only a small fraction completed it.  Most stopped within the first four lectures.

How’s your optimism level now?

Why am I being such a Debbie-downer?  Because you need to be honest with yourself about your goal.  Stop for a second and consider some reasons why you might not finish:

1. You arbitrarily picked a goal that you don’t really want to do the work for
2. You picked a goal that is too challenging for you right now
3. You don’t have the time to complete your desired goal

If one of those reasons is giving you a nagging feeling that you may fall victim to it, here are some things you can do to fix it early:

1. Think about an activity you would actually enjoy, and pick a goal based on that
2. Cut your goal in half.  That will be hard enough as it is.  You can always do more later.
3. Re-evaluate your priorities.  Is there anything else you’re spending time on that isn’t as important?

Chunk it Up

Now that you’ve thought long and hard about what you want to achieve, let’s consider how to go about doing it.  The easiest way to make progress on any goal is to break it up into small chunks.  Compared to a large, vague goal, small pieces are less intimidating and easier to focus on.

For example, one popular class here on Curious Reef has been Learning Vim From the Inside, which has an above-average participation rate.  I attribute a lot of that to the fact that the instructor made it easy to get started.  The first assignment is simply to install Vim with two commands that he gives you.  That’s it.

I used that same technique for the Programming in C class, where the first assignment is not much more than a “hello, world” program.  That class was just created recently, so we’ll have to wait and see if small assignments lead to a higher participation rate there also.

Commit to a Schedule

This is kind of obvious, but it deserves to be explicitly stated.  You really need to create a set time to work on your goal and focus on sticking to it for the first few weeks.

If you look again at the graph of MIT lecture video views, you’ll notice that the ratio of views from the last lectures to Lecture #5 is about 40%.  That means (assuming video views correspond to learning) that people who get through the first five lectures have a much higher chance of completing the class.

Make a point of incorporating your new activity into your life, and it will become easier over time and you’ll be more likely to stick with it.

You Can Do It!

Hopefully this article gave you some ideas on how to evaluate and stick to your New Year’s resolution.  If your goal is educational in nature, consider joining or creating a free class here on Curious Reef.  You may find that others share the same goal and you can work on it together.

Good luck!

You can view all messages (and homework comments and topic replies) on your Inbox page: http://curiousreef.com/messages/.

To send a message, just enter the person’s username in the “to” field on the send page. That will put your message in their inbox and send them an email notifying them that they received a message.

Hopefully this will help instructors keep in touch with their students and increase collaboration.

If you have any other suggestions for the site, use the contact page and let me know about them.

Also, there is a Feaure & Bugs forum along with a forum specifically for class creators.

Go ahead and check them out now.  They’re pretty empty at the moment, but if you help by posting, we can get the ball rolling.

Here’s the link to the 400th submitted assignment.  It’s a short but important introduction to the Python programming language.  There are now 50 people who have completed the first assignment, which is outstanding.

Nice job, chrcoe!  Keep up the good work everyone.

Although there is a lot of content available for free and that can be redistributed non-commercially, make sure to review and respect the creator’s rights before creating a class on the material.  I have not reviewed all of the licenses for these sites.

1. MIT OpenCourseWare
2. Stanford Engineering Everywhere
3. Open Yale Courses
4. UCSD Podcasts
5. List of freely available programming books
6. Academic Earth
7. VideoLectures.net
8. Khan Academy
9. YouTube EDU

Let me know if I’ve missed any sites that you think are link-worthy.

Of course, don’t think that classes have to be strictly based on content that is “academic worthy.”  Less formal classes are encouraged as well, such as Bash Scripting and Learning Vim from the Inside.

Keep up the good work everyone!

The default license is Creative Commons “Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike,” and that can be changed to any of the six Creative Commons licenses.  Support for additional licenses will be added soon.

You can see an example on the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs class.

If you have a specific license that you would like to see added, leave a comment or shoot me an email.

First, now you can embed YouTube videos practically anywhere.  Just paste the YouTube URL (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY) and it will automatically turn into the proper embed code in your post.  This works in homework assignments, homework comments, forum topics and replies.  This applies to class creators also, and videos can be embedded anywhere in the class lesson and assignment content.  For example, I’m working now to embed the video lectures for SICP into the class itself:

http://curiousreef.com/class/structure-and-interpretation-of-comp/lesson/1/

It should make the classes more convenient to use since it will all be on the page for you.

Lastly, all links now have the nofollow attribute attached to them.  This tells search engines not to follow those links, which means they get no SEO value from them.  The reason for this is to try to deter spammers.  There have been repeated attempts by spammers to post links in the forum, and I hope this measure will help get rid of that problem a bit.

Speaking of the activity page, it’s been slightly improved.  It’s now a little faster than before and it includes homework comments and topic replies.  Previously those weren’t included on that page.  Now you can better see the action on the site.

The field supports Markdown, so you can get fancy with it and include links to stuff on the web if you want to.