Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
My comment is merely anecdotal, I guess, but I believe if I were part of this study my data point would have been considered a 'statistical anomaly'.<p>I am a career changer who moved from admin roles to software development. This part of my life started in 2014, when I decided to make the change. My first instinct was to get a degree, since I had never got one before, so I started an evening presential course with a local university.
During the course, I often noticed that I wasn't taking much in from the lectures, so I'd come in on weekends and do my study then. I'd still attend classes, as I was always afraid I'd miss something important for the exams, but this turned out to be rarely the case. In my last year, I was already so frustrated with spending 3 hours in class each night after a  day at my full time job, that I decided to completely skip my lectures altogether. Surprisingly, these were the modules where I had the best performance.<p>There's a lot of correlation here, but in my case I'd say that what motivated me were not the classes themselves, but the deadlines. I tried online at-your-own-pace classes before in my previous career (accounting), and they did not work at all. It was very hard to keep myself motivated. Again, the correlation here does not necessarily indicate causality -- it could be argued that the lack of motivation came from the fact that I didn't like the subject. But I still believe that what works best for my case is to have a deadline, and learning resources other than presential lectures.<p>TL;DR: career changer who tried learn-at-your-own-pace resources for previous career path and wasn't successful. Then tried presential lectures + self study for CS career, was moderately successful. Best results were obtained with self study + externally imposed deadlines.