how do you learn

How Do You Learn?
Learning isn’t a one-shot process: take the course, pass an exam,
and get out. You learn by interacting with instructors and students,
by assessing your progress, and using that to plan your next steps.
It’s an ongoing feedback loop that involves everyone in the classroom
(whether the classroom is virtual or physical).

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At O’Reilly, we’ve thought a lot about how people learn. And we’ve
built live training programs (both online and in-person) that allow
people to learn in whatever way is best for them. We have built
learning programs that work.


Learning is social
O’Reilly Media has always been a learning company. When we began to publish
books in the mid-80s, our editorial guidance for authors was to write as if they were
“a friend looking over the reader’s shoulder, providing wise and experienced advice.”
In 2016, we’re about much more than books. We’ve long had instructional video and
conferences. In the past year, we’ve introduced live online training, in addition to live
in-person training at conferences and other locations. But the same standard
applies: we want the people who learn with us to feel like they have an expert
looking over their shoulders and providing seasoned advice.
How do we do that? It starts with realizing that learning isn’t just a one-way
experience. When we analyzed conference attendance and early online courses, we
saw that people participate as groups. More than 50% attend our online courses as
teams. People don’t attend courses as teams just so they can hang out together

during breaks; they attend as teams so they can learn from each other, apply their
new knowledge to their particular situation, and bring that knowledge back to their
co-workers. When a team attends training, the group learns much more than sum
of the individual experiences.

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Furthermore, we discovered that teams attend to hear what other teams ask. For
example, another group attending may be further along their journey toward
streaming analytics; they may have already encountered issues your team won’t hit
for another six months. So learning isn’t just about what you need to know now, or
what your teacher thinks you need to know now: it’s about interaction with other
learners and their problems. It’s about taking advantage of other learnings to
discover where you’ll be in 6 months or a year.


O’Reilly’s live training events – whether online or in person –
offer instructor-led, hands-on courses, with an emphasis on
the social aspects of learning. That’s in stark contrast to
typical training products based on pre-recorded classes. Each
course is led by an expert practitioner in the subject,
someone working in industry. They’ve seen what works and
what doesn’t – instead of just memorizing a syllabus and slide
deck. These instructors guide you through hands-on course
materials and they’re available to help answer your questions
at any point. And you’re able to interact with other students,
learning from their experience.

right answer: we can give actual coding assignments, and
evaluate learners’ solutions.

Learning is a feedback loop

Offerings: What do you
want to learn?

O’Reilly integrates assessment into almost all aspects of our
learning experiences. We focus on formative assessment – in
other words, providing useful feedback – rather than
“quantifying students.” Our work on computable content
opens the door for live coding as part of assessment. We
don’t give quizzes that test whether you can remember the

You can have the best teachers and teaching methods in the
world; it isn’t worth anything if they aren’t teaching courses that
are relevant to your needs. In the next two months, our live
training calendar includes courses on data science, design,
operations, security, software architecture, programming, and
business. Topics range from design for the Internet of Things to
programming in Python and distributed services with Spark. We
have courses for beginners, to help them build the broad
structural literacy that will help them to learn more; we have
courses for experts, to help them drill down into specialized topics.
And that’s just the start: we’re still building out the calendar.

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You and your team have just finished a course. How do you
know that you’ve learned? Assessment is one of the trickiest
areas in education. Most “assessment” in the industry
devolves into memory quizzes. But simply quizzing students
on whether they’ve memorized the appropriate answers
doesn’t tell you anything about learning.

This kind of assessment goes hand-in-hand with instructor
feedback: our instructors can see students’ weaknesses and
can help them through tough spots, rather than just assign a
grade. And we can recommend content for future learning,
with full knowledge of the students’ strengths and
weaknesses. If a student is weak in some areas, additional
background may be helpful. If a student is particularly strong,
she may be able to skip ahead. All this is part of our
subscription-based learning platform.


All of our courses feature a learning promise.
That’s a “Roles to Goals” description of the intended
audience, what prerequisites are required, what you’ll learn,
why it matters, and how you’ll apply it.
Our Learning Promise for the Online Course Building Distributed
Pipelines for Data Science Using Kafka, Spark, and Cassandra

That’s how we approach learning at O’Reilly.
We recognize that learning is social, and we’ve built a

platform that allows instructor and students to interact with
each other. We’ve engaged instructors who are expert
practitioners in their fields, and who have hard-earned
wisdom to share with their students: they’re familiar with the
best (and worst) practices, the trade-offs, the gotchas that
can drive a student crazy. We’ve built tools that make
assessment part of a feedback loop, so instructors can
“invert the classroom” and focus on providing help where
it’s most needed. And we’re building a rich program of inperson learning events: you can attend online, at
conferences, at our Boston training center, or at other
venues.

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Shared learning: that’s what we do, and we’d like
to share that with you.