The two most important things you need to cover is first to convince them that they really can learn without teachers—after 12 years or more of being on the receiving end of “professional education” this can sometimes be pretty hard. Next, they need to develop a doable and believable (they need to believe in it) plan to achieve whatever their goals are (see the Study Hacks thread on “deep procrastination”, especially this one). Cal says that deep procrastination tends to strike relatively late in a college career, but that is because college students’ motivation has external, social supports (most of their friends are also students, grades, and threat of failure) that aren’t applicable to independent learners. So independent learners tend to have more motivational problems, which start earlier, than college students do.
Study techniques, especially structured review (including spaced repetition), are probably the most important “how-to”, but they don’t do any good without getting their motivation un-blocked.
The two most important things you need to cover is first to convince them that they really can learn without teachers—after 12 years or more of being on the receiving end of “professional education” this can sometimes be pretty hard. Next, they need to develop a doable and believable (they need to believe in it) plan to achieve whatever their goals are (see the Study Hacks thread on “deep procrastination”, especially this one). Cal says that deep procrastination tends to strike relatively late in a college career, but that is because college students’ motivation has external, social supports (most of their friends are also students, grades, and threat of failure) that aren’t applicable to independent learners. So independent learners tend to have more motivational problems, which start earlier, than college students do.
Study techniques, especially structured review (including spaced repetition), are probably the most important “how-to”, but they don’t do any good without getting their motivation un-blocked.