One of my learning rituals is to look for online videos to better understand the concepts that I’ve covered in class.
Lectures nowadays are taught with slides. This often lead us to go through mathematical formulas and other complicated concepts at a quicker speed than our brain (at least mine) can handle. Moreover, you might still need to some ‘refresh’ on topics you’ve learned time ago. You may also need to learn from scratch topics you might had not seen before.
I started by undergraduate degree back in 2009 when MOOC courses and online learning were in their early days. Looking for information came usually in written form. Nowadays, I just go to YouTube and look for videos that people create to explain different topics. I’ve always been able to find a good video for every concept I’ve wanted to learn, in a matter of a few clicks.
I was explaining this to my dad during Christmas and his first question was, do people actually teach online for free?
…and my answer was YES, you can find a good video explanation for almost everything on YouTube.
When looking for videos to learn from, I try to go for the ones taught in the old way: with a blackboard (or something similar).
Online videos will use different ways of replicating a blackboard. Some I’ve found are the following:
| The reverse mirror | The digital blackboard |
Direct writing on slides |
 |
 |
 |
| E.g.: Dimensionality Reduction (PCA) | E.g.: Stationary vs Non-stationary processes | E.g. Principal Component Analysis |
My favourite is the reverse mirror, the person takes the time to go step by step through different formulas and concepts. This type of video also provides some body language when necessary (as well as the human touch!).
Do you have any favourite learning tactics or learning sources? Share them in the comments box below 🙂
