The Trap of tutorials and online courses
How tutorials and online courses can create an illusion of competence, and how not to fall into this trap
Online tutorials and courses are great. You can learn about anything from the best instructors in the world for free or for a reasonable price (in most cases at least). The rise of the online learning platforms like Coursera, Udemy, Edx, Udacity etc. has made it possible for anyone to get their hands on the best materials to teach themselves about anything they may find interesting. And because of that we often fall for something that is known as the “Tutorial Trap”.
What is the “Tutorial Trap”?
Well there are many versions of this. But the way I define the “Tutorial Trap” is — When an individual takes courses after courses or reads tutorials after tutorials on any given subject, blindly following the examples of the courses, thinking they are gaining enough knowledge to implement the skills in the real world, but never actually doing so.
Following the examples that the instructor is teaching doesn’t give you the ability to implement them on your own. Sure, You gain knowledge about the subject and I am not denying that. But if you have ever tried doing a project on your own, without the supervision of any instructor, you will know how different it is from following along in a course. If you only take courses after courses and run after certifications without ever trying to apply the knowledge in real world scenarios, you will gain what is often called as the illusion of competence. But it is just that, an illusion.
For example, let’s say you took any famous Udemy course on Machine learning because you want to transition to that field. After you complete that course and earn the a certificate of completion, you got recommendation of 3 other courses. You chose Coursera’s Machine learning course. Same story, you finished the course, earned a certificate. Then Coursera’s Deep learning specialization, then something else, then something else…. You see the problem with this approach? You are not applying what you have learnt!
Until you apply the knowledge you acquired from courses on different types of real world problems on your own, get stuck in the process, and find a way to resolve the issues, neither you will truly master what you have learnt nor gain true confidence in your skills.
Now that you know what the “Tutorial Trap” is, how can we avoid falling in this trap?
Well, from my own experience of spending countless hours in this downward spiral, I have found that keeping these 4 things in mind while learning something from any course can help a lot in learning anything effectively.
Keep real world use cases in mind:
Whenever you are leaning about a new concept, always try finding out real world scenarios where this particular technique is used to solve a problem.
For example, if you are taking a course in Data science, and going through the sections on Hypothesis testing, p-value, Z score; Google the real world applications of these concepts, and make a note.
In this way, not only your learning process will become more interesting, but also will help you to recall which techniques to implement while dealing with any real world problem on your own.
Change the Examples:
If you are following a course on Natural Language Processing, and learning how to do sentiment analysis on any particular data set (e.g. Twitter data set), it makes sense for you to copy the example exactly to produce the same result. But instead of doing that, I would highly encourage you to get your hands dirty with another data set (e.g Amazon fine food reviews data set), and do sentiment analysis on that. Or, if you are learning how to create a simple To Do list, instead of copying the example line by line, try changing the example drastically, and create something different with the same basic principles that are applied to create the To Do List application.
In this way, you will learn how to use the same building blocks on different kinds of problems or on different kinds of “environment”, and build something new, and I guess I don’t need to explain how valuable that is to excel in any given career! This will surely increase your confidence to tackle real world problems on your own.
Try to Improve the examples:
It is normal for courses to use a running case study or project to teach different concepts to the students. Instead of blindly following through the case studies, you can use your existing knowledge to slightly improve the project by adding additional functionalities to the project. This will help you stand out from the crowd as well as help in building a great portfolio.
For example, I was enrolled in an online course of machine learning, which had a case study on Self driving cars with a challenging/interesting mandatory assignment related to that case study at the end of the section. Most of the students including me only completed the assignment, but there was one guy who took it one step further. Instead of the data set provided in the course (which was not recorded on Indian roads), he installed a camera on his own car and drove around Indian roads and used that data set for his own case study, that project helped him stand out in every interview. I was fascinated when I heard about this from the instructors.
Go the extra mile, it is never crowded.
Do a Personal Project:
Finally after weeks of hard work you have finished the course and earned yourself a certification to get some credibility. What should you do now? Now that you have finished a course or two on Machine learning or Web development or anything else, you are ready to dive deeper by taking one of the advanced courses, right?
No. Stop. Give yourself a break from taking courses. Go ahead and do at least one personal project related to what you have learnt in the course. In this way you will know how to tackle a problem from scratch, what to do when you don’t have the solution to the problem you are stuck in the next video or page. This will improve your knowledge on the subject and help you gain confidence in the process. After you are done, write a blog about the project or make a video to show the world what you have built.
Having a portfolio of such projects will help you a lot in the job process.
And after you are finished with at least one personal project, you can go ahead and dive deeper by taking another course.
These few tips have helped me lot. I hope you will also find them helpful. If you liked this article, please leave a like. It will encourage me to write more often.
About Me:
Hi my name is Sukanta Roy, I am a software developer and an aspiring Machine Learning Engineer, Former Google Summer of Code 2018 student and a huge psychology buff. If any of these things interest you, you can follow me on medium or you can connect with me on LinkedIn.
