Nov 15, 2021 2 min read Life In General

Avenues Of Education

There are more learning avenues today than what it used to be 25 years back.

Back in the 90's the mainstream medium for education used to be schools and colleges. You had a limited amount of external exposure other than the knowledge you can gather through libraries and that too was very sparse considering I came from a village.‌‌

The library used to provide me with a lot of books, mostly novels that were written in English and other Indian languages, translated to Malayalam.‌‌That's it.‌‌TV's favored soaps with endless twists which could probably serve you if you're after learning a language and that too Hindi (DD1).‌‌

Fast forward 25 years and today, schools and colleges are at the bottom of the chain for information gathering or learning in my humble opinion. The visual media, be it TV, YouTube, or any other online teaching, self-learning experience is too overwhelming now. There are millions of possibilities for one to learn about a particular subject.‌‌I became better at aquariums, photography, and videography by just using YouTube. There are hundreds of paid courses on the same subject, even more schools that provide a degree in some of these. Technical or behavioral, the amount of information you can gather from that one single source is overwhelming.

However, the real question is, how many people utilize it?‌‌

Micro-education sites like Coursera, Udemy, eDX, etc are doing a great job which poses the question as to whether the colleges remain as they used to be? Would someone physically spend their younger years stuck to an institution while you could get the same (better in some cases) education at your convenient timings online? The tech industry is currently going through a major innovation curve with new and better technologies catered only towards serving you with knowledge...‌‌It's just amazing to see and very fulfilling.

The next amazing thing that connects you with thought leaders in the industry is podcasts. You would feel years of experience by listening to some of the podcasts that are of 45 minutes long and connect you with great folks like Tim Ferris, Naval Ravikant, etc, for free...

The question is, are we utilizing them to the fullest and thereby increasing our knowledge. It helps bypass years of experience but just understanding what ticks & why!

Schools must encourage students to seek out wisdom outside of the four walls. Ensure that they are given insight into the endless opportunities that the Internet presents to them...

5 very simple Tips to fast forward anyone's learning curve;