Sunflower Intelligence
The open bloom to the right of the vase in the painting, petals spread wide.

Learn

Learning by doing

Van Gogh was largely self-taught. He worked through drawing courses page by page and copied the painters he admired, long before the sunflowers. Practice that is a little beyond you, repeated before you forget it, is still how skills grow.

“I keep on making what I can’t do yet in order to learn to be able to do it.”Vincent van Gogh to Anthon van Rappard, Nuenen, about 18 August 1885

Free courses in finance and accounting, business analytics and marketing, written to a university standard. Each lesson teaches from first principles, works examples step by step and gives you practice with feedback; each course has labs, tests and a project. 14 courses are complete. One course is written and independently reviewed, with final testing under way. The other 18 are planned, and marked as such.

Start here

New to all of this? Each of these courses is open and starts from scratch, so pick the subject you most want to learn. The Beginner path shows what to take after it.

Three schools

Learning paths

Three suggested routes through the catalogue. Not sure which fits? The skills check estimates your level in a few minutes and this section will recommend a path from it.

Labs

Workbenches where you do the work rather than read about it. Each belongs to a course but can be used on its own.

Your toolkit

How the courses work

Complete is not the same as mastered

A lesson is complete when you have worked its guided problems and scored 80% on its knowledge check, not when you open it. Mastery is estimated separately from your first answers, using Bayesian knowledge tracing, and decays unless you review.

Worked examples, then practice

Beginners learn faster from studied examples than from solving problems cold (Sweller and Cooper, 1985), and answering questions strengthens memory more than rereading (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006). Every lesson does both, with hints first and feedback that explains the mistake.

Spaced review

Each lesson comes back for review when you are predicted to be about to forget it, using half-life regression (Settles and Meeder, 2016). Questions you got wrong come back too, and the glossary doubles as flashcards.

Checked, and honest about it

Every number printed in a lesson is recomputed by a test; journal entries must balance and statements must add up. Each lesson was reviewed for accuracy by a second reader. Sources are listed in every lesson, and anything not yet verified says so.

Your progress stays with you

Progress, notes and bookmarks are kept in this browser only: no account, nothing sent anywhere. Clearing your browser’s site data deletes them, so the Notebook lets you download a copy and load it elsewhere.

What it can’t do

There is no teacher marking your work: written answers are marked by you against a model answer and a rubric. Answer keys are in the page’s code, as on any static site. The labs’ data and the companies in them are fictional.

Sources

  1. Van Gogh to Anthon van Rappard, Nuenen, on or about 18 August 1885, letter 528.
  2. Sweller, J. & Cooper, G. A. (1985). The use of worked examples as a substitute for problem solving in learning algebra. Cognition and Instruction, 2(1), 59–89.
  3. Roediger, H. L. & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.
  4. Corbett, A. T. & Anderson, J. R. (1995). Knowledge tracing: modeling the acquisition of procedural knowledge. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, 4, 253–278.
  5. Settles, B. & Meeder, B. (2016). A trainable spaced repetition model for language learning. Proceedings of ACL.