Vacations and leisure reading seems like a thing of childhood these days. Partially because life has been so busy, but also because the focus of my life has changed. No longer are vacations about being is a specific location, and reading about diving into some other reality. Instead, they are about the people I am with and the new things I can learn.

Three words stand out in the word could above – memories, read and trilogy,. While specific vacation spots are precious, it is the memories of past excursions with loved ones that hold the most value. These are things that cannot be recreated no matter how much we might want to try. While people are central to the memories we hold about vacations, they involve more than just group activities . They are also about individual moments of quiet meditation to rejuvenate and reconnect, and about the adventure that comes with reading a good book. When it comes to vacation reads I prefer to navigate the well trodden path of best sellers and classic works. My preference: trilogies and book series where several novels take you away to an historical period or a new world where alternate dimensions, space travel or even time travel are viable options, but where the human experience remains the central tenet.

While fiction offers a moment of escape from this reality, it is non-fiction that dominates my reading and media consumption. It is learning, rather than escape, that is the main focus. Over the years I have experienced several different modes of learning – from acquiring a new skill with an experienced guide (aka grandma) to reading mass market non-fiction and watching pre-recorded lecture series from experts in their field. The one thing these all have in common though is their self-driven nature. Motivation is a key ingredient in learning, without which it just doesn’t happen. Without motivation, people can go through the motions and memorize enough information to possibly pass a class or two. But learning is about more than memorizing bits of information, it involves adding to or reorganizing our existing understanding of the world, which takes work and in some cases an open mind.

Motivation may be the foundation, but what goes on top can differ greatly; some structures will function well, while other will not. To function well with motivation, our structure – whether online or not – should include the freedom to engage with this new, and potentially challenging material when the learner is ready to do so. One huge benefit of reading a book or watching a video is that the learner can re-read a section of a book or re-watch a particular section of a video. In other words, the learner is not constrained by someone else’s schedule and can thus revisit any portion of the material whenever they want, how ever many times they need. In fact, there’s some evidence that this alone is likely to result in a better retention of the material (25% to 60% vs. 8% to 10% for face-to-face).

While this self-paced independent manner works well in an online format – not everything can be learned this way (at least not well). For example, social engagement with other learners is a big part of learning, however online interactions are likely to be of lower quality than face-to-face. As this suggests, online and face-to-face (or online synchronous) will provide learners with very different opportunities to engage with one another and with a more knowledgeable individual (e.g., an instructor). This is important because learning is essentially a social endeavor: we learn from others so that we can function together as a social group. For me, this is the biggest challenge of online learning. How do we engage socially in an essentially independent medium? Yes, we have social media, but its delayed, abbreviated text cannot compare to the live, complex nature of face-to-face, and to some extent online synchronous, interactions.

Learning is a life-long endeavor, and doesn’t just happen face-to-face in classrooms. Some may even argue that what happens in classrooms isn’t really learning at all. And that the real learning takes place every day for the things we need (or want) to know, when we need (or want) to know them.