Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Keeping track of your learning with Remember The Milk

Being a self-learner in open online courses can be very rewarding, but setting your goals can be difficult to keep up with alongside a busy life. This week’s tip, shared by aviskas, uses a series of tasks to keep yourself on schedule and review your progress.

We live in a great time where learning is available for everybody through such initiatives as Udacity or Coursera. There are more than 100 courses available, and it’s not only a good possibility for us, but also something that is very hard to organize. And here RTM comes to help! So, I want to start from the very beginning: making a system for reviewing courses you enrolled in.

1. After enrolling in an interesting course, I make a task with the name like “Start of: Gamification”.
2. Of course, all such tasks go in the list #Learning, where I keep track of all my learning activities (I am not only an online student, but also a real student =).
3. Then, add tag #coursera or #udacity.
4. If the course start date is available - add it!
5. Priority. I use low, because I used to use medium for assignments and high for exams.
6. Don’t forget about URL! It can be very useful, for example, if you have courses like “Gamification” and “Game Theory” and you cannot distinguish them =). So add the URL for the course info page.
7. I also add notes with course duration info and so on.

Why so much work for only the start date? If you are a learnaholic like me, you will enrol in dozens of courses. And to review all of them, make a Smart List with query “(tag:coursera or tag:udacity) and priority:3”. Maybe you can include something more specific for your query - play with it!

Be a learnaholic, be an RTM-holic! And good luck for all Coursera/Udacity students.

Thanks for sharing this tip, aviskas! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.

Do you have a suggestion for our weekly Tips & Tricks post? Got an interesting set-up or idea? Head over to the Tips & Tricks forum, add a new topic, and let us know how you use Remember The Milk. Each week we’ll give away a 1 year Pro account to the user whose idea inspires the Tips & Tricks Tuesday blog post for that week.