LearnSmart4Life is about two things that sit underneath every subject: learning to learn, and learning to think. It brings together, in one place, everything in the FlourishIQ family that helps a person study well, think clearly or teach well. It has two doors. One is for the people who are learning: school leavers, students and anyone learning something hard. The other, TeachSmart, is for the people who teach them.
The work behind it is older than this site. In 2002 EquipU4, then a business unit of Stellenbosch University, published LearnWell, Learn to Think and Think to Learn, an interactive multimedia study, thinking and life skills programme on CD. Thousands of students used it between 2002 and 2006. LearnWell for Study Success followed on DVD in 2006, and every Stellenbosch first-year received a copy that year. In 2007 it was replaced by LearnWell4Life, Boost Your Brain for Study Success, in Afrikaans, English and isiXhosa, which was presented at the World Conference on E-Learning in Vienna in 2008. Its nine chapters, from Start Smart to Tests and Exams, are on this site in all three languages, with a free course built on them, free to watch and free to run with a class.
The thinking half of that first programme was ThinkWell, created by the EquipU4 team: Dr Ludolph Botha, Professor Charl Cilliers and myself. ThinkWell teaches practical thinking skills, from weighing pros, cons and alternatives and taking all information into account to planning, decision-making and problem-solving, each with an image to remember it by. Those skills are taught again today in the course ThinkWell4Life, where each one is paired with the habit of mind that makes you use it when it matters, and anyone can try one in ten minutes in the free ThinkWell Practice Gym.
Through the learning door you find the student pathway, one course for each stage from the year before university to the postgraduate road; courses on attention, habits, beliefs and steering your own life; help for the weeks when study gets hard; Everyday Maths & Science Knowhow; and conversation decks and personal editions for thinking out loud.
Through the teaching door you find the TeachSmart Evidence Library: 205 studies on how people learn, each checked against the published paper and graded honestly for the strength of its evidence, from strong to contested. Every card says what the study found, what it means in a classroom or lecture hall, and one thing to try this week. Where a finding has not held up, the card says so. Staffroom view puts any study on the big screen with a question for the meeting, and the course Teach with the Evidence turns the same studies into practice in your own lessons and lectures.
If you are learning, I suggest you begin with the free LearnWell4Life chapters or the course for your stage. If you teach, open the Evidence Library and draw one study for your next staff meeting. The introductions that follow say, for each course and product, who it is for, what is inside and where to begin.
Dr Alten du PlessisFounder, LearnSmart4Life