Self-taught MIT 33 courses in a year? There are ways to study crazily

[ Guide] The ability to quickly master complex information is critical to achieving excellence in business. Scottyoung's learning process not only applies to students, but also helps to learn the expertise of complex skills.

The ability to quickly master complex information is critical to achieving excellence in business. Scottyoung's learning process not only applies to students, but also helps to learn the expertise of complex skills.

Recently, at the TED conference, a young man named Scott Youth shared one of his astonishing accomplishments: he completed all 33 courses in the MIT Computer Science Undergraduate Course in a year and passed the exams. What's important is that he is completely self-taught, watching online tutorials, and then taking the actual exams to make a personal assessment.

MIT's 33 courses in computer science are some nut, from linear algebra to computational theory. Moreover, the MIT curriculum cannot be done in a cramming way, and rote memorization is not feasible. Because the MIT exam has a high demand for problem-solving skills, it often has a number of questions that have not been seen. Second, MIT's curriculum is gradual, and even if you can pass a test, the seventh lesson in the same series may not be enough. Young can pass the exam, mainly by "accelerating the process of understanding."

Young was studying enrol, and according to his progress, it only takes 1.5 weeks to finish a course. Young also shared his 33-course experience with his blog, and he was not prepared to switch to a computer worker. The main purpose of the matter is to prove that it can be done.

How do you learn 33 courses in MIT in a year?

Although learning faster has many benefits, most people are reluctant to think about "how to learn". Probably because we don't believe in this kind of thing, in our opinion, the speed of learning depends only on good genes and talents. There are always people who are gifted, but your way of learning is also important.

Deeper knowledge processing, and sometimes repetitive restudying, in some cases will speed up your learning efficiency. Yes, studies have shown that without the right approach, learning will always stagnate.

How to build your knowledge system?

Most people's classic way of learning is to listen to lectures, read books, if not yet understand, have to do a lot of exercises (poke) or re-read notes. Without a systematic approach, it seems impossible to understand faster. We've probably all experienced "Aha! I understand" the kind of happiness, but the psychological mechanism of epiphany is completely unknown.

And understanding itself is hard to call a switch. It is like the layers of the Onion's epidermis, from the most superficial understanding to deep-seated comprehension, consolidating the cognition of the Scientific Revolution. Skinning such an onion is a process of understanding that the average person knows little and is easily overlooked.

The first step to accelerating learning is to uncover the process. How to understand the problem and deepen your understanding depends on two factors:

Establishing a connection between knowledge, self-debugging knowledge connections are important because they are an access point to understand an idea. I struggled with the Fourier transform until I realized that it turned the pressure into pitch, or the radiation into color. These insights are often linked between what you know and what you don't understand. Debug troubleshooting is equally important, because you often make mistakes, these errors root to the end, or the knowledge is incomplete, chest underachievement bamboo.

Poor understanding is a software program that is riddled with errors. If you can effectively self-debugging, will greatly speed up the learning process. Establishing accurate knowledge connections and debugging errors is enough to form a deep problem perspective. Mechanized skills and rote memorization are usually only useful if you have a positive intuition about the nature of the problem.

Delve into learning methods, you will learn faster over the course of the last few, I have perfected a method that accelerates the process of understanding by layers. This method has so far been used in various subjects, including mathematics, biology, Physics, economics and engineering. With just a few changes, it's also good for mastering practical skills, such as programming, design, or language.

The basic structure of this method is: knowledge, practice, introspection. I'll explain each stage and let you know how to execute them as efficiently as possible, while giving detailed examples of how I applied to the actual course.

Three stages of fast learning

1th Stage Knowledge Coverage

You can't organize an attack if you don't even have a topographic map. Therefore, the first step in the study is to have a general impression of what you need to learn. In class, this means you need to read a handout or read a textbook, and if you teach yourself, you may want to learn a few more books on the same subject.

One of the mistakes students make is to think that this stage is the most important. In many ways, this stage is the least efficient, because the unit time investment only for the smallest amount of knowledge return. I often accelerate to complete this phase, it is very good, so that I can devote more time to the next two stages.

If you're watching a video of course lectures, it's best to tune to 1.5 or twice times fast forward. This is easy to do as long as you download the good video and then use the "speed" function of the player. I used this way to finish the course video of one semester within two days. If you're reading a book, I suggest you don't take the time to highlight the text. This will only keep your knowledge understanding at a low level and, in the long run, make learning inefficient.

A better approach is to read only occasional notes, or to write a summary of a paragraph after reading each of the main chapters. For example, here are the notes on the Machine Vision lesson:

2nd Stage Exercise

Doing exercises can greatly contribute to your knowledge understanding. However, if you are not careful, you may fall into two efficiency traps:

No immediate feedback: research shows that if you want to learn better, you need instant feedback. Therefore, it is best to do the answer in the hand, the world I have, each completed a question on the answer, self-censorship. A late practice without feedback or feedback will only seriously hamper learning efficiency;

Stuffed: Just as some people think that learning starts at the classroom, some students also think that most of the knowledge is produced from the exercises. Yes, you can always end up with a knowledge framework through stuffed, but the process is slow and inefficient.

Exercises should highlight the areas of knowledge that you need to build a better intuition. Some techniques, such as the Feynman technique (the Feynman technique), are quite effective. For non-technical disciplines, it is more of a requirement that you master concepts rather than solve problems. So, you often just need to complete the minimum number of exercises. For these subjects, you'd better spend more time in the third stage, forming a discipline of insight.

3rd stage Introspection

Knowledge coverage, and doing exercises, is to let you know what you do not understand. This is not as easy as it sounds, after all, it is difficult to know what to know and not to know. You think you know, in fact, not, so the old make mistakes, or, you have a comprehensive discipline in the heart of the end, but also do not see exactly where you do not understand.

The next technique, which I call "Feynman's skills," will help you to check out the gaps and go farther on the way to knowledge. This technique helps you fill in the gaps in knowledge, especially those that are most difficult to fill, when you can accurately identify points of knowledge that you do not understand. This technique can also be dual-use. Even if you really understand an idea, it also allows you to relate more ideas, so you can continue to delve into and deepen your understanding.

A strategy to learn faster

I describe the three stages of learning: knowledge, practice and introspection. But it can make you misunderstand that they are always executed at different times, never overlapping or repeating. In fact, as you continue to understand knowledge in depth, you may go through these stages in a cycle. You have just started to read a chapter, can only have a superficial impression, but after doing exercises and establishing intuition, you come back to reread, and there will be a deeper understanding, that is, warm and know new.

The learning process I describe is not just for students, it also helps to learn complex skills or accumulate a topic of expertise. Learning skills like programming or design, most people follow the first two stages. They read a related basic book and then experience it in a project. However, you can use the "Feynman technique" to take a step further, to better lock in and articulate your insights. Accumulate a topic of professional knowledge, also with this reason; the only difference is that before you build your knowledge, you need to collect some learning materials, including related research articles, books, etc. In any case, as long as you understand the areas of knowledge you want to master, you delve into it and learn it deeply.

Feynman skills (The Feynman technique)

The inspiration for this technique stems from the Nobel Prize for Physics, Richard Feynman (Richard Feynman). In his autobiography, he mentions that he has struggled with a difficult research paper. His approach was to scrutinize the supporting material of the paper until he had mastered the knowledge base and was able to understand the hard ideas.

The Feynman technique is also the same. To deal with a knowledge side complex such as hair, rich connotation of the idea, should be divided into small pieces of knowledge, and then deal with each other, you can eventually fill all the knowledge gap, otherwise, these gaps will hinder you to understand the idea.

The Feynman technique is simple: take a piece of paper, write the idea or process you want to understand on the top of the page, and explain it in your own words, like you're teaching others.

The most important thing is to divide an idea into one, although it is possible to repeat some of the points of knowledge that have been understood, but you will eventually reach a tipping point that cannot be explained again, and there is the knowledge gap that you need to fill. To fill this gap, you can check your textbooks, ask your teacher, or search the Internet for answers. In general, once you have precisely defined your confusion or misunderstanding, it is relatively easy to find the exact answer.

I've used this Feynman technique hundreds of times to make sure it can handle a variety of learning situations. You can assume that you want to clarify the knowledge point to a five-year-old child and draw the simplest way to explain the concept in your mind.

I still insist on using Feynman's skills to deal with your completely confusing concept. Open the textbook and find a chapter explaining the concept. I go through the author's explanations, then carefully imitate them, and try to elaborate and articulate them in my own mind. In this way, the guided Feynman technique is useful when you cannot write any explanations in your own words.

You can also use the Feynman technique to understand a process you need to work with in a variety of processes. Take a look at all the steps, not just what you do at each step, but also how it's done. I often understand the mathematical proof process, the chemical equation and the biological glycolysis process.

Dealing with the content that needs to be remembered Feynman's skills can also help you self-check whether or not to master non-technical disciplines of the profound knowledge concepts. For a topic, if you can apply Feynman's skills smoothly without reference to the original material (handouts, textbooks, etc.), you will prove that you have understood and memorized it.

form a deeper intuition combined with exercises, Feynman skills can help you peel off the shallow layers of knowledge understanding. But it can also help you delve further, go farther, not only shallow understanding, but the formation of deep knowledge intuition. It's not easy to understand an idea intuitively. It seems a bit mysterious, but it's not the truth. Most intuition of an idea can be categorized as follows:

Analogy: You understand an idea by identifying an important similarity between it and an idea that is more easily understood. Visualization: Abstract concepts are also often useful intuition, as long as we can build images of them in our minds, even if this picture is just an incomplete expression of a larger and more diverse idea. Simplification: A scientist once said that if you can't explain something to your grandmother, it means you haven't fully understood it yet. Simplification is an art that strengthens the thinking connection between basic concepts and complex ideas.

You can use Feynman techniques to inspire these instincts. For an idea, once you have a general understanding, the next step is to analyze it in depth to see if you can use the above three intuition to illustrate it. During the period, even if the use of the existing image figurative meanings, is also justifiable. For example, it is difficult to think of a complex number in a two-dimensional space to understand it, but it can make you visualize the concept so that the concept is shaped in your mind. DNA replication, which is imagined to pull a one-way zipper, is not a perfect analogy, but as long as you know the similarities and differences in your mind, it becomes useful.

Self-taught MIT 33 courses in a year? There are ways to study crazily