How to Learn Online: Actively Collaborate

Much human learning comes from experience. People encounter problems and situations in the world and try to find solutions. By doing so, they acquire the knowledge and skills they need to navigate the future. Formal education adopts this approach too. Experiential learning is a dominant pedagogical technique.

This reflects the nature of human learning capabilities. In most cases, the brain builds memory and understanding over time, through iterative cycles of feedback and feedforward. Any parent or schoolteacher can attest to this. Young minds learn from the past and project the future.

That said, once learning has occurred, people exploit knowledge and skills in very different ways. Sometimes they think fast and intuitively, by drawing on emotion and encoded procedures of habit and routine. At other times they think slow and deliberatively and apply complex calculative techniques. As Daniel Kahneman explains, we think both fast and slow.

Impact of Digitalization

Digital innovations have enormous benefits for learning. These days, almost anyone from anywhere can access enormous amounts of information and education. We should celebrate this democratization of knowledge and learning. The problem, however, is that digital systems easily overwhelm the human capability to monitor and manage online floods of information.

In fact, digitalization disrupts traditional patterns of human learning. Much is now channeled through online devices and networks. People can access information at the touch of a button. But often they learn out of context and without prior knowledge. For this reason, online learning is increasingly detached from experience.

New Dilemmas

This creates novel dilemmas. As I explain in my recent book, Augmented Humanity, digitalization can short circuit natural feedback mechanisms. Artificial systems are so fast and convincing that people have little time or incentive for corrective feedback. Instead, they are quick to trust and absorb information and then move on.

For this reason, digitalized learning may result in fakery and falsehood. Without the benefit of reality checks and time to reflect, learning can be distorted and unreliable. It also propagates bias, discrimination, and may even trigger violence.

How to Learn Better

To mitigate these risks, we should maintain a strong connection between learning and lived experience. Even when relying on artificial intelligence, learning should be embedded in the real world. Humans must remain active in the loop. Indeed, that is another reason why face-to-face connection remains critically important in education.

This leads to another surprising shift. Digitalized learning calls for a new approach to thinking. On the one hand, thinking fast by computers must support humans to think slow. While on the other hand, for humans to think fast, computers must slow down and allow this to happen.

In summary, humans and machines must help each other to think both fast and slow at the same time. They need to support and balance each other. The shared challenge is to develop skills of metacognitive collaboration, that is, the capability to monitor and manage our cognition.

We must therefore learn how to learn online. Not as docile recipients of artificial inputs. But as active participants and co-creators of knowledge. Computer scientists are already designing such systems. Educators at every level should work in this direction too.