Informal Learning from an Online MOOC

It's summertime officially. Yea, we can go out to play. My memories of summertime involved lots of play time in a vacant lot next to our house. We organized our own games and sometimes played neighborhood legacy games. We taught each other the rules and strategies of games like kick the can, flashlight tag, and SPUD.

What actually was transpiring was informal learning.

Through my research I discovered that we learn 70% to 80% of our knowledge via informal learning. We learn 20% to 30% in classrooms, schools, and universities. Wow, that's a lot of learning going on over the summertime. But it is so much fun, how could we be learning?

Informal learning is intrinsically motivated. We do it because we want to do it. Makes a big difference is how deep we learn. We might be able to remember games of SPUD learned 30 to 40 years ago, but fail to remember our third grade math teacher's lesson plan. Often if we are intrinsically motivated we will remember what we learned longer. (For the record Sister Matilda was my third grade teacher and I will never forget that ruler she used to rap our knuckles)

Wondering about what you would like to wonder about more this summer?

There are plenty of MOOCs online. MOOC stands for Massive Online Open Course. A popular course may have students from all over the world, have hundreds even thousands taking the course. Some course are taken at your own speed, some are guided over 8 to 10 weeks. There is usually no credit given for the course, but you can pay extra for a certificate that you completed the course. A nice thing to hang on your wall. At the end of the course you know what you know. You use what you learned in your life or in your job. Or perhaps you just take a course out of curiosity about something. MOOCs can help you become a smarter person who when tested in the formal school earns better grades and higher credentials.

There are plenty of offerings available online for FREE. Kahn Academy has a great math section. They do a good job determining what you need to learn and what level of math you are competent. Coursera has a number of offerings from prestigious universities all over the world. I will be taking a course to help me get better organized called Get Organized: How to be a Together Teacher.  EDx is a joint effort between Harvard University and MIT. I took Leaders of Learning last summer and was really impressed. This summer I plan to take Introduction to Data Wise: A Collaborative Process to Improve Teaching and Learning. It is weird to take it alone, since it is all about getting a team of teachers together to use data correctly to improve instruction. Data is a new horizon and I will be getting new data tools for analysis at work. So this course could benefit my instruction and the institution. EDx is also offering a course called Design and Development of Games for Learning. This sounds interesting if you want to create an application to present a learning game for your students. Udacity is another source for engaging online courses in the area of programming, data development and computer science.

Open Courseware is online courses mostly for free from the top universities. You could take a history class at Yale or a class in Managing Refugee Healthcare from John Hopkins University. You could invent a money making smartphone app in a free online course from MIT.

What will you find to learn informally this summer?