How to Make The Best Out of Your Learn-From-Home Experience?

These are my five ways to make your learning more content

Along with your laptop & phone, you can start learning from home. (Source: Arguo Hungary)

You are a University Student, and your campus just issued a statement to let you all Learn-From-Home. We have a situation that we all hope to get better soon.

In the case of the COVID-19 outbreak, thousands or even millions of students are starting to Learn-From-Home. As it’s good to maintain social distancing, by avoiding social interactions and to have activities in our own premise.

The next question is How to make the best out of your Learn-From-Home time? As it’s going to be a different experience with the regular study activities in class. Here are my five ways to make your learning experience better.

Organize your day through Calendar

Google Calendar Look & Feel in Desktop (Source: Blog.Google)

I know that this sounds like a Boomer's advice, but I found it very useful to organize and keep your day on track. I use Google Calendar, as it’s easy and offering a good user experience. On this, you can block your time for

• Virtual Class
• Group Discussion, you can invite your peers and add links for Video Call & relevant docs.
• Personal Learning Time
• Work on Assignment
• Reading Time

On organizing through Calendar beware on these potential drawbacks, that might harm your learning experience

• Over or underestimating the time, I realized that it’s quite hard to estimate the right amount of time to block on a session. For instance: 30 minutes personal learning session to learn about three chapters of Digital Marketing foundations won’t suffice for me. Try to estimate better by assessing your ability to digest knowledge.
• Too broad, You need to specify a learning agenda on a session you’re going to. In my case, I would love to add an agenda in the calendar description so that I would keep on track of what I want to learn.

Dealing with distractions

Maintaining focus is difficult, we should all admit on this. Especially we’re wired to have a short-span of it, your phone notifications can easily swift your focus from having a deep work on something to an itch to check on. These are simple ways to deal with distractions.

• Mute all of your phone notifications, It includes your email, chat, social media, and games/entertainment. For me, I would mute all of my notif while having a deep work and let a phone call to the exception. As I’m aware if something urgent happens people will directly call me. This will work on a period of time that you need to set by your self.
• Find your place, In order to have a comfortable space to learn you need to find/create one. A clean & tidy desk with sufficient natural lights is good for you to learn. I used to let my desk empty with nothing on it so that I can just put my laptop & water bottle on.
• Be committed, I believe that what defines a modern society is their ability to be highly-trusted without much supervision. In virtual learning, it’s easy for us to escape, such as not abiding the deadlines, keep postponing the work, and skipping the class. So, it would be great to have a self-commitment on your Learn-From-Home moment.

Pomodoro Technique Sketch (Source: Sketchplanations)

• Try Pomodoro, it’s a time management technique to work within intervals and been prooved as a more efficient way of working. With this technique, you will be able to have a break in each Pomodoro, and got a longer break after repeating four times.

Build Up your skills & knowledges

This is my favorite part, as you can explore and deepen a range of skills. Thanks to the internet as they offer tons of reference to a free online course, educational videos, and e-books.

Free Online Course

• Coursera, you can take a free course from world-renowned education institutions including those from Ivy League or Russel Group. It’s ranging from engineering, humanities, social science, business, and creativity. For a free version, you can audit the course and pay some money to acquire the certificate. Tips: You can apply for scholarships, especially for students to get the paid course + certificate. You can look at EdX, Udemy, Class Central as the alternatives as well.
• LinkedIn Learning, This is my latest finding and I found it very engaging. They can chunk the content into a bite-size video that is easy to understand yet comprehensive. To access this, you can start a free trial for one month of LinkedIn Premium and start to use it. At the end of the course, you can acquire a certificate too. I just finished my fourth course this month, and it’s about Urban Design & Planning, as I found it interesting to get to know the basics of it.

Here is it!

• If you prefer an audio learning or podcast, you can try Inspigo. They offer free access during this COVID-19 Outbreak.
• You’re Indonesian, looking for a course delivered in Bahasa, these are the recommended courses: eLearn.id, Tempo Institute Writing Class, and IndonesiaX
• For specific skills like Software Engineering, apart from the abovementioned sources, you can try Progate, Mimo, and Grasshoppers.

Educational Videos

• You’re a vivid Youtube viewers, then here are some channel recommendations for you to watch, TED, TED-Ed, Vox, Kurzgesagt, and School of Life.
• Netflix? Why Not? Discover a thought-provoking series and movies like Explained, Pandemic, Babies, Rotten, Dirty Money, and 100 Humans.

e-Books

• There are plenty of sites that provide free access to e-Books, here are a couple of them, Project Gutenberg and Open Library.
• If you’re looking for academic textbooks, you can search on Cambridge Core. This site gives you free access for HTML format until the end of May 2020.

Establish a portfolio

This way is equal with planting & nurturing the seeds for the future. It’s a way to build up your credibility & rapport on the specific skills that you have. Here are some instances

• Aspire to be a Software Engineer? you need to look for a project, Open-Source project would be better and put that into public repo such as Github. The more you push codes to your profile then the more attractive you’re in the eyes of recruiter.
• How about Product/Graphic Designer? You can showcase your work in Behance or Dribble
• You wanna be a Data Scientist later? You can participated in Kaggle.
• Journalist or Content Writer? You can use this platform, Yes, Medium or Issuu.
• Video Editor? Youtube is your place to put all of your works.

The point of this is to improve your presence through your work, so that it may helps you to unlock better opportunities in the future.

Expand your network

This means expanding your professional networks, In my take there are two sites that help a lot and I bet all of you already familiar with that.

• LinkedIn, The most common platform for professionals to showcase their profile and interact with insights and opportunities. I used to assess my influence through Social Selling Index, it’s an assessment of your profile power based on four criteria and ranging from 0–100 points. One of the tricks is that you just search a role that you aspire to be, connect, and start a conversation with her/him. By that, you can get a firsthand experience of what it's like to work on that role.

An Example of Social Selling Index, You should check yours! (Source: business2community)

• Twitter, Many professionals now communicating their thoughts through Twitter, and it’s a good way too to interact directly with people you want to get close or aspire to be.

Woah, it’s a long list already. I hope you’re now energized to start your Learn-From-Home moment, and you can make the best out of it.

Enjoy, Stay Safe & Positive 🙌😊