Final Lifelong Learning Reflection

For the first few week, I took a historical course at Khan Academy for my Lifelong Learning project. It was very informative and interesting when I learned about the ancient history, the period before the recorded history.  It means the period of time the ancestors of all human beings existed without writing or other records.

For the few week after, I took a course named Advanced formulas: 30 days challenge at The Collins School of data. This website is very useful and I strongly recommend it. Ben Collins teaches functions of spreadsheet, from basic and fundamental ones to complicated ones and how to combine them to sort and analyze data in the way that we want. For example, you can see from the picture below the curriculum and what we can learn from this course. The curriculum is sorted for students to took steps by steps and gradually get to more complicated lesson. Each lesson takes no more than fifteen minutes and is edited in a very concise and concrete way, which make learning formulas more interesting and not too time-consuming.

Unfortunately, because of the busy schedule, I only can keep up with this course once a week and until now I have just finished four days of the entire course. Day one I learned about some basic core skills. It teaches about some errors that commonly happen, about ranges, how to name a range, created a protected one and other practices. Day two we learn about functions related to if (if, ifs, etc) and day three I learned about counting formulas. Data validation is taught in day four.

This course is great because not only does it teach us  by video, which means a great visualization, it also provides us with starter template for practicing on our own. By taking a video screenshot of each lesson, the author gives a great demonstration of empirical practice, which helps students learn a lot better and quicker. Not only that, we can have access to the solution file to look for and find ways to correct our mistakes.

This course of Ben Collins helped a lot because I learned many useful functions that are not only essential for accomplishing the class work but to fulfill my personal project. When the semester is over, I will continue learning, of course finishing this course of spreadsheet formulas, and not only that. I wish to dig deeper.