MIT Challenge

[lv211]

This guy spent 12 months completing a 4-year college degree for less than $2,000.

He did this by using a series of learning hacks (e.g. watching videos at 2x speed), and through time management (he made time logs to monitor how he spent his time during the day).

I found his Ted talk to be very informative. He makes a compelling argument why in certain circumstances online learning is more effective that actually attending the class in person.

http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/mit-challenge/

[mxt0133]

This was an awesome TED talk!  Thanks for the link.  I agree so much about what he has to say about traditional education.  I completely agree about how much I have actually learned in class vs self-studying/group work studies.  I feel that my children's education experience will be dramatically different from my own. 

[dragoncar]

Interesting.   I sometimes watch sitcoms and prime time dramas at 2x speed, so I guess I'm just wasting time twice as fast.

Edit: I usually stick with 1.5 unless there are some real slow talkers.  I push it up to 4x during tender staring contests, slow dances, and good cries.

[Donovan]

I did a lot of online courses and self-study things like that while I was in college. It's all fantastically interesting, but it can be very time consuming if you accidentally let yourself get going on too many classes at once :) I managed to learn enough about web design and javascript in 3 months (and 4 years of previous, non-web programming experience) to land myself a job doing it, so I'd say it can all work pretty well if you really work at it.

I've dropped most of that now because I haven't found many that focus on my current area of study (music education), so I'm stuck with more traditional text-based sources at the moment.