Learning to learn

7 min readFeb 28, 2020

After another hiatus, I’m back. Today I finished John Thompson’s interesting course, OpenAPI: Beginner to Guru, and I was starting to write a review when I realized that the introduction was getting more prominent than it should have been.

I decided to divide the post into two parts, one that I will talk about the good and the bad parts of Udemy, and another with the review of the course itself.

Introduction

One of the motivations that led me to write this post is the way I discovered that I learn better, in my case, through courses and videos.

I believe that a good point for everyone is to evaluate this aspect and focus on how to absorb knowledge better. I have friends who learn best by listening to podcasts, others by reading documentation and books.

This post idea is not to discuss what would be the best or worst way to learn. The idea is how to enhance knowledge in the case of also learn by courses and videos. I will discuss some negative points, as well.

Knowledge, my point of view

I remember a college professor who told me once in a class about three types of understanding and their implications. He drew something like these three circles, and explained that there were three types of knowledge:

The innermost circle would be of the things we know. That circle represents the understanding we have now.
The next circle is the things we know we don’t know. It’s as if, given the knowledge we have now, we know that there is a next step to be explored.
The third circle would be the things we don’t know that we don’t know, it’s knowledge that we can only achieve when we learn the things that we know that we don’t know, and we realized that we had more things to learn, but that a while ago, we didn’t have even a notion.

According to this approach, knowledge would be something infinite, because, every time you learn things you didn’t know, and consequently enter the next circle, your current knowledge becomes what you already knew and what you learned.

After that, you realize that there are more things to learn, that now are the things you don’t know, and after that, things you didn’t know you didn’t know.

You realize then that there will always be things that you don’t know, and there will always be things that you don’t know that you don’t know.

Catalyzing knowledge

I remember that when I found out that I learned better by watching classes and video lessons, I spent a lot of time taking courses at the most diverse educational institutions:

One, in particular, helped me a lot in the way of learning, and I think it deserves a separate topic, Caelum.

Caelum | School of Technology

I remember that when Caelum opened here in Brasília, I was taking a course at another educational institution. We were having a problem with didactics and content, and a colleague, who at the time was already a Intermediate to Senior Developer, told me that Caelum was going to open in Brasília and that he was going to do FJ11, the Caelum first Java development training course formation.

In my mind, that what this seems like:

A more experienced Java developer said to me that he would take the first course of a Java training company.
I was a Jr developer, recently graduated with little Java experience.
Why not do the same course and improve my developer skills?

I took a course at Caelum, and ended up taking courses after course.

In my mind, that what this seems like:

If I could learn things from instructors who talked about problems that I didn’t even know existed, naturally, I would learn faster than just looking for answers to something that I knew I didn’t know.

Something like, if I trained with a higher load than I subjected to, and surrounded myself with more advanced people and challenges, I would consequently grow, because it would catalyze learning.

Caelum has an educational approach that has always been a registered trademark of the institution. It is as if it led you to reason through challenges and questions that would lead you to the solution of the next step, not without first showing you that this next step would lead you to another problem that you did not know you had.

For those who are Christians or has studied something about the New Testament, it reminds me very much of a type of reasoning applied by the apostle Paul. In some passages, it seems that Paul argues with you through a text, even though he died a long time ago. It is as if he knew the next step that his reasoning would take, showing the mistakes or successes of our conclusion.

Returning to the story, unfortunately, a strange thing happened to me: one day, Caelum left me an orphan, in other words, there came a time when there were no more courses in the backend area to be taken.

Currently, Caelum has changed its course schedule, a fascinating strategy, but at the time, there were no more courses to be taken, then I met Udemy.

Udemy | The good parts

Udemy has become popular as remote learning platform. Thanks to her, anyone could expose their knowledge and charge for it.

New perspectives were available to me, as well as new risks: If anyone can teach a course, how do you know who the best instructors among so many instructors?

Udemy helped me with that answer in another way: choose by sampling.

Udemy is adept at eventually launching a course promotion. What I started to do then was to buy several courses for R$ 19 (something like U$ 5), because if one of them were worth the cost-benefit, it would be fantastic.

It was on purchases like these that I reached some instructors that I am looking forward to launching new courses today:

I also found out that on the platform, there are courses offered for free, as well as sites that monitor moments when courses have a coupon that could reach 100%.

I acquired course after course, month after month, and that’s when I discovered some of Udemy’s problems.

Udemy | The bad parts

The first problem with the Udemy model is: till today, I haven’t met a person who uses Udemy and told me that he finished all his courses.

What happens is that as it is effortless to purchase a course, and most of them are very cheap, you end up buying a lot of courses.

Another problem with the platform model is how to discover good courses when you are a beginner.

I once search for a “microservices” course with Spring. What I found in several cases was an introductory course on Spring Boot and persistence in relational databases, something quite different from microservices. Although a microservice can follow this stack, microservices concept are much more complicated than a REST API that communicates with a database.

Conclusion

One of the things I realized is that there is no silver bullet, and for that, it would be interesting to separate the content that I am learning by niche, and I believe that this can be a good tip for those who have a form of learning similar to mine.

In the past, when we were going to do school work, it was common to look for references in encyclopedias like Barsa. The advantage of this approach was knowing that we had a reliable source of research.

Nowadays, the internet has brought an advantage and disadvantage to this problem. Anyone who has sought an answer to a question on StackOverflow can understand that. It is quite common for the same problem to appear ten different answers, many of them wrong. It is necessary to filter the information.

For the infrastructure segment, for example, I have followed LinuxTips. For the security segment, I have followed e-Security.

Another interesting point that I have followed on YouTube channels on some subjects that interest me. I still have the same problem with Udemy, several saved videos that I didn’t watch, however, without spending a cent. Here are some channels I follow:

In the next post I will review the excellent OpenAPI: Beginner to Guru by John Thompson.