There are a lot of bloggers (John Sonmez is the most notable), who I have stopped following because they have shifted to video. I really don't have the time to watch a video, when I can read the same content in text form 2-3x faster, and do a Ctrl-F to find any terms of interest later when I want to review the content. It's a singularly inappropriate form of communication for technical subjects.
I imagine it has to hurt their Google rankings as well, especially when they don't include a transcript.
Simply: The average person can read at ~300 words per minute, and listen at ~150 words per minute.
I'm not a big fan of video as a tool for conveying information in general. Not only can I read faster than I can listen, but I can skim and skip around as well. There are situations where video is the best way to impart certain information, but those seem to be the rare cases. I hate it when websites make me sit through a 3 minute video in order to get an answer to one simple question, or to understand "What does this thing do?"
I've never taken a MOOC course because I can't imagine having the time to watch X hours of someone talking at a camera. If this video-less trend catches on I might actually be able to benefit from online education.
I recently picked up a video series on Udemy with a 90% off coupon I found, and this is my exact problem. If I'm following along, I have to pause and rewind the video so often, and other times I'm flipping through reddit because he's dragging on about something or having technical difficulties while recording. Every time I need to rewind the video, it buffers for several seconds, or sometimes freezes and needs me to reload the tab. Never mind that I can't go back to a lesson and Ctrl+F to find something that was referenced later on.
It seems like everything I search for these days, I find as a YouTube video. Why? I was trying to take the center console out of my truck and needed to find out what size the bolts were on the back of the driver's seat. Only results were YouTube videos. So I'm sitting in my garage streaming a five minute YouTube over my limited LTE just so I can find out it's a 17mm wrench. Most of that five minutes is the guy telling me who he is, how to subscribe, what website he's with, and why I need to watch the video that I'm already watching. Google can tell me the up-to-the-minute March Madness scores but the only way to find out what size wrench is needed for a Chevy Silverado, one of the most common trucks in the US, is a YouTube video from a guy with an accent so thick I can't understand him.
Useless. Some days I feel the world would be better off without YouTube. Until the day when we can index and search video and voice the way we can text, YouTube is nothing but entertainment to me. Stop making "educational" videos, I don't want to watch them.
It appears I'm in the minority here somehow, but I am a strong auditory learner. Like to the point where I sometimes suspect I'm borderline dyslexic, but I don't have any of the usual symptoms of it. Meanwhile, I can listen to audio at 3x speed with ease.
With a regular book for example, I'd take about nearly a year to finish just 1 probably, if I can even stand to read it consistently, and even then I wouldn't remember most of the information from it, making the entire time spent on it seem like a large waste.
With audiobooks on the other hand, I can read a large book in about 2-3hrs, and have read about 25 books per year because of them. I even use text-to-speech on ebooks for titles that don't have audio versions -- it's just that much more efficient for me. I can go out for walks while listening, do laundry, cook, whatever, and still get my learning fix, all while retaining about the same [albeit poor] amount of information as I would with reading normal books.
Now whenever I can, the first thing I do when trying to learn about a topic, is go to youtube and watch long lectures on it at 2x speed, or download them and watch them at 3-4x speed. That seems pretty efficient to me if what I want is a good overview of something. If I want to reference back to specific factoids, then text is better of course, but for a completely new subject I'm not familiar with at all, audio/video is a godsend for me. Dense texts like wikipedia might as well not even exist as learning materials for me, cause they just cause me endless headache trying to parse them if I don't know what I'm looking for ahead of time.
Agreed, I would be more inclined to watch videos if they were highly edited. If you want to watch a MOOC on linear algebra the videos you will find are little more than a camcorder stuck in the corner of a classroom and dumped online. For a topic that really doesn't change decade after decade at some point someone is going to come along and produce a highly edited video that contains all of the key points, presented in a clear manor and it will become the defacto set of videos for these type of topics.
I've started many MOOC's but never finished because I couldn't keep up with watching the videos. Not being able to flip back and forth is really limiting. The only courses[1] I've finished had good quality notes and completely depended on them and avoided the lecture videos.
[1]: Roughgarden's Algorithms part I, Programming Languages by Dan Grossman and Machine Learning by Andrew Ng.
You can always speed the video up. While I realise that this is a suboptimal solution and I also prefer text, I don't think I've ever watched a MOOC video on normal speed.
As others have stated, the reason that video is worse than text for learning is because
A. The rate at which you can read is faster than you can listen
B. Video technology is often a hassle when you need to skip around.
C. It's cheaper to write and revise text than video.
D. Videos consume large amounts of data.
But I'm going to add another point.
E. Lecturers most often don't know what I as a student am struggling with. They may focus on things I understand easily and spend a majority of time discussing things I already know. However, if I decide to skip a portion of a video I could potentially miss a really important detail necessary for understanding the subject matter.
With a book I can skim. Important information is often marked in a certain way to make it stand out from other data. It's also organized in sections and chapters so I can easily skip around. With videos this isn't possible.
Also, what happens when all of this information is outdated? Now you have a bunch of videos with outdated and potentially false information out there and nobody will know.
My ideal alternative would be to remove lectures entirely and to have interactive labs where teachers and TAs help students complete assignments based on assigned readings. The instructor for the course would be responsible for overseeing the teaching assistants and preparing the course outline. The TAs would help guide the students in completing the assignments or mini projects. Then a couple of time a semester there would be larger projects that tie together what the students have learned.
> My ideal alternative would be to remove lectures entirely and to have interactive labs where teachers and TAs help students complete assignments based on assigned readings. The instructor for the course would be responsible for overseeing the teaching assistants and preparing the course outline. The TAs would help guide the students in completing the assignments or mini projects. Then a couple of time a semester there would be larger projects that tie together what the students have learned.
_yes_.
This seems so obvious to me. I am completely mystified as to why all universities seem to be ignoring it. I worry that it's just because videotaping lectures and putting them online is so much easier than actually re-evaluating the pedagogy.
Well said. Where's the video version of Wikipedia? Hacker news/reddit?
As a teaching tool, video doesn't lend itself to iterative refinement or discussion. It's an excellent audiovisual experience, but also a bet that the content is best delivered in a read-only format. (Practically, you can't update a video, only redo it -- presumably at full cost.)
I see video as a supplement to lesson formats that can be improved over time (text, or whatever medium comes next).
The one hang-up here is that you then need to participate synchronously with the course -- TAs can only be available for so many hours a week.
I looked at a course like you describe for this semester. It looked fantastic, but I live in Europe and it was taught on the East coast of the US; I would have had to wake up at 2am my time to participate.
Last year I took a course that was almost entirely written -- the professor felt more comfortable if his lectures were written out, so he did so. The videos added flavor, but >90% of the content was there directly in the lecture for me to refer back to.
Having many ways to learn available -- lecture, reading, question/response, group work -- maximizes the chances a student's particular strengths will be matched in the course.
I would augment A to "the rate at which you read while learning is highly variable throughout the material and differs from person to person". Sometimes I can plow through a chapter in an 20 minutes and sometimes it takes me a week to get one paragraph. And the paragraph that takes me a week you might get in 5 minutes. With text we can each go at our own pace and trivially change pace with the nature of the material. With video we all get the same pace and it's the pace the instructor thinks is best.
I've been watching the SICP videos this weekend with the goal of making it all the way through this time (I tried watching them about a year and a half ago after taking my first programming MOOC).
What struck me this time was how much the emphasis is on practical software engineering rather than Lisp. That's what Ableson is so intensely passionate about in the video, not the theory. And so picking up the book and looking at the parallel text, I reread it in a whole new light. It was like rereading Eco's Name of the Rose after 25 years and not as the piece of pop fiction I thought it was the first time.
Which brings me to my point that video is just another communication channel. It conveys particular information efficiently and other information less efficiently. Text is no different. Without the video I would never have picked up that SICP and Code Complete have many similarities in subject matter and one just starts with a clean slate and the other in the messy middle.
Video does not need to be fancy to be effective. See Jeffery Ullman's Finite Automata on Coursera. It's PowerPoint and a small talking head and a red pen: And it's better than reading the book he wrote with Who because though dense, it's an order of magnitude less dense than the text.
On the other hand, University of Phoenix operated its online courses with NNTP and was reasonably interactive though asynchronous. It's a matter of curriculum development I suppose. Dan Grossman at University of Washington compares developing a MOOC to writing a textbook and that probably captures the domain of possibilities.
I fully agree videos shouldn't be the main way of giving lectures in MOOCs. Or more accurately: I don't find videos particularly useful to me.
My experience is based on 3 programming courses from Coursera: Functional Programming Principles in Scala, Reactive Programming, and Programming Languages. In all three cases, the videos did little to improve my understanding of the material, and I preferred the slides. Unfortunately, because the videos existed, the slides were (in general) less complete; I'd rather the videos did not exist and the written material was more complete instead.
Videos frustrate me because the lecturer goes too slowly or chooses to focus on the parts I find less interesting. And because it's pre-recorded, I cannot ask him/her questions. Yes, I can skip or fast-forward the video (in one course, I was so used to playing every lecture at max speed, I was surprised to find the lecturer's voice at normal speed sounded completely different :P ), but I find it so frustrating I'd rather be reading detailed text instead.
The embedded interactive quizzes are fun and motivating, but I wonder if the videos are needed at all.
I've taken two of those courses. I often typed the example code from the lectures in or took notes as I would in a brick and mortar class. This meant slowing the lectures down or pausing them or rewinding them. That's great for me...but I'm on Norvig's ten year plan.
In my experience, both with self-study and at university, the best way to gain and retain knowledge is by working problems. To do this you need: demonstrations of the concepts, problems, hints and solutions.
Hints and solutions can be time consuming to obtain at university (office hours) and might be impossible if you can't find instructor manuals for self-study.
Khan Academy makes the most sense to me. You work the problems until you can't, at which point you use the hints or watch the videos. Then continue.
The only lectures that were useful to me at university was the first one, where they discussed how the class would run, and the last one where they discussed the exam.
Labs and tutorials were useful if I wanted to get hints on how to work problems.
I agree with TFA. Videos should by no means be the focus. They can be very helpful demonstrations. If the goal is to be able to solve problems, that's what you should be spending the most time doing.
Not that I frequent many MOOCs, but I have not seen Khan Academy like techniques anywhere else, not even at edX. I think KA's got it right. They've got the best possible solution which will evolve things to the next level, if MOOCs are to stay afloat in the future.
In my experience, both with self-study and at university, the best way to gain and retain knowledge is by working problems. To do this you need: demonstrations of the concepts, problems, hints and solutions.
Oddly enough, I found this to be the case, even in my humanities courses. I learned more about a subject by having to write about it, than from merely reading or memorizing for an exam.
I'm surprised this is a surprise. I thought it was common knowledge that videos were a terrible medium for education. That was the lesson of the failed 1990's "multimedia education" push.
I don't get why MOOCs are so focused on video. I think many people enjoy the relaxed experience of watching a video more than reading, but why ignore people who rather jump right into a text? A text is easier to skim search and reference than a video, and easier to keep up-to-date for the creators. However, I think the best option is a combination of text with visual and interactive content, such as graphical representation of complex ideas and manipulable formulas or code.
One advantage of videos is the emotional component. It seems like students do enjoy videos over whatever text the instructors provide.
Another advantage is the subtle leakage of the instructor's opinions and thought processes. At least I perceive video to be slightly better in this regard.
A text is easier to skim search and reference than a video
That's great when you're refreshing or referencing, but when you're learning something from scratch, text presents an easier opportunity to "skim" and miss things than video which sorta decides the speed of the treadmill for you.
I'm the author of a book and the amount of queries I get that were answered on the previous page.. I think many people just don't read every word in books they read (but I sympathize, because neither do I).
The video poison is spreading to software documentation too. I can't imagine a bigger waste of time than watching someone type code or work on a command line, yet I've gotten the request many times. For GUIs I can somewhat sympathize, especially if the software changes the layout with every release (I'm looking at you, Blender), and it really does take 1000 words to describe where to click. But typed, word-oriented communication does not benefit from videos. And unless you're Vi Hart, teaching mathematics probably isn't going to benefit from an all-video presentation either. So, kudos to the author.
I'd be fine with a video-less MOOC. Just give me a textbook and tell me the chapters to study and what assignments to work on, and I'll be fine. It's difficult to do this on your own because you never know what to focus on without guidance. You're likely to waste valuable time down some unimportant or meaningless rabbit hole! Of course, I'd hope the MOOC would offer a support mechanism in case I needed help.
I was recently re-reading a textbook that I had in college and I realized just how much of the book we skipped in class when I noticed how many chapters were unfamiliar to me. I remembered how much we skipped around to put things in a more logical order and what questions we skipped in the tests as well... not sure why textbooks are often written to illogically that it takes a teacher to decipher them.
I agree with most of this and am the developer of Presentious. We believe audio paired with slides + a transcript with full-text search is better than video 9/10 times. You can see it all in action here: http://presentio.us/view/p1tcHs
I'm actively seeking feedback and testers in the education space!
Recently completed MITx 600.001 which had a fair share of lectures along with a textbook. The lectures were mostly just a rehashing of what was presented in the book but there was something about watching the code run that really made a difference. I also think that having "finger exercises" after a short video explaining a concept is quite helpful. Although it seems that could easily be achieved in book format as well. The live feedback after submitting code was what helped me the most.
At the same time as this I took another course on a different website (coursera) Cloud Computing Concepts Part 1 which was entirely lecture based. The topic was extremely interesting to me and I have moved on to the next course in the series but I do find the all lecture format with quiz based homework to be less than ideal. I try to make up for the lack of a textbook by reading the documentation of concepts covered each week but often times it is hard to pick the most essential material.
The edx platform is really stunning in terms of engagement and feedback from a student perspective. It is easy to imagine a course presented on it with little to no lecture if a strong companion text was provided.
My favorite thing about the MITx MOOCs are that they have really well-designed, carefully-devised problem sets, which I think might be the most important factor of a great class.
In fact, as far back as 1971, Donald Bligh concluded that “there is not much difference in the effectiveness of methods to present information.”
Apart from 1971 having only nascent experience with educational videos, it's really hard to accept that the science videos of the 50s and 60s were no more effective at imparting information than a book. Seeing things move around as the presenter talks about them can really help to understand the topic.
It really depends on the topic that's being discusses - sometimes a video is better, sometimes a book is better, sometimes you absolutely have to get your hands dirty. You can read a book all you want and watch videos 'til the cows come home, but neither will make you proficient in tying a ligature.
I guess my problem with the statement is that it's absolutist. Some things are better in text, some things are better shown, some things are better done in person, not to mention other methods as well. Choose the appropriate tool for the job. And know your audience as well - the 'general public' is different to 'self-motivated autodidacts', for example.
Some of the most effective compsci related MOOCs I've found are the Udacity programming MOOCs that have live coding. You can just drop right into a python REPL and try using what you just learned. We need more of this in a variety of domains.
While I agree with the author on the relative uselessness of lectures/video, I wonder how much this is related to individual learning styles. I definitely observed many classmates who benefited more from lectures than I did.
The thing that bothers me more is how many of these MOOCS require you to sign up to be able to watch the lectures. Sometime I would just like to watch some of the lectures and not have to bother with assignments and quizzes.
Moocs wouldn't have the same pull if they didn't do video. There are reasons why "E-Learning" never really took off before the MOOC movement.
Some part of this is that text books tend to be written as reference material, and don't come with a "first learner's cut", a path through the material which is suited for someone just starting to learn the subject.
Videos are a medium which seems to be easier to master for university instructors than really good teaching texts. Don't ask me why...
It's not only MOOCs that use videos a lot. There are so many self publishers who sell videos as a bonus to an ebook. At a premium price. Nathan Barry and Brennan Dunn may be the most prominent examples for this and Barry even advices this practice in his book "Authority" - and he is successful with this strategy. So obviously some customers perceive videos as an extra value and are ready to pay the premium price.
Some MOOC have both video and PDF slides. I remember a computer graphic corse on Coursera. The videos were obviously useful in many ways but the PDFs were better for finding the formulas when doing the tests.
[+] [-] douche|11 years ago|reply
I imagine it has to hurt their Google rankings as well, especially when they don't include a transcript.
[+] [-] douche|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karmacondon|11 years ago|reply
I'm not a big fan of video as a tool for conveying information in general. Not only can I read faster than I can listen, but I can skim and skip around as well. There are situations where video is the best way to impart certain information, but those seem to be the rare cases. I hate it when websites make me sit through a 3 minute video in order to get an answer to one simple question, or to understand "What does this thing do?"
I've never taken a MOOC course because I can't imagine having the time to watch X hours of someone talking at a camera. If this video-less trend catches on I might actually be able to benefit from online education.
[+] [-] freehunter|11 years ago|reply
It seems like everything I search for these days, I find as a YouTube video. Why? I was trying to take the center console out of my truck and needed to find out what size the bolts were on the back of the driver's seat. Only results were YouTube videos. So I'm sitting in my garage streaming a five minute YouTube over my limited LTE just so I can find out it's a 17mm wrench. Most of that five minutes is the guy telling me who he is, how to subscribe, what website he's with, and why I need to watch the video that I'm already watching. Google can tell me the up-to-the-minute March Madness scores but the only way to find out what size wrench is needed for a Chevy Silverado, one of the most common trucks in the US, is a YouTube video from a guy with an accent so thick I can't understand him.
Useless. Some days I feel the world would be better off without YouTube. Until the day when we can index and search video and voice the way we can text, YouTube is nothing but entertainment to me. Stop making "educational" videos, I don't want to watch them.
[+] [-] axlprose|11 years ago|reply
With a regular book for example, I'd take about nearly a year to finish just 1 probably, if I can even stand to read it consistently, and even then I wouldn't remember most of the information from it, making the entire time spent on it seem like a large waste.
With audiobooks on the other hand, I can read a large book in about 2-3hrs, and have read about 25 books per year because of them. I even use text-to-speech on ebooks for titles that don't have audio versions -- it's just that much more efficient for me. I can go out for walks while listening, do laundry, cook, whatever, and still get my learning fix, all while retaining about the same [albeit poor] amount of information as I would with reading normal books.
Now whenever I can, the first thing I do when trying to learn about a topic, is go to youtube and watch long lectures on it at 2x speed, or download them and watch them at 3-4x speed. That seems pretty efficient to me if what I want is a good overview of something. If I want to reference back to specific factoids, then text is better of course, but for a completely new subject I'm not familiar with at all, audio/video is a godsend for me. Dense texts like wikipedia might as well not even exist as learning materials for me, cause they just cause me endless headache trying to parse them if I don't know what I'm looking for ahead of time.
[+] [-] icefox|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rohitarondekar|11 years ago|reply
[1]: Roughgarden's Algorithms part I, Programming Languages by Dan Grossman and Machine Learning by Andrew Ng.
[+] [-] wyclif|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] penprogg|11 years ago|reply
As others have stated, the reason that video is worse than text for learning is because
A. The rate at which you can read is faster than you can listen
B. Video technology is often a hassle when you need to skip around.
C. It's cheaper to write and revise text than video.
D. Videos consume large amounts of data.
But I'm going to add another point.
E. Lecturers most often don't know what I as a student am struggling with. They may focus on things I understand easily and spend a majority of time discussing things I already know. However, if I decide to skip a portion of a video I could potentially miss a really important detail necessary for understanding the subject matter.
With a book I can skim. Important information is often marked in a certain way to make it stand out from other data. It's also organized in sections and chapters so I can easily skip around. With videos this isn't possible.
Also, what happens when all of this information is outdated? Now you have a bunch of videos with outdated and potentially false information out there and nobody will know.
My ideal alternative would be to remove lectures entirely and to have interactive labs where teachers and TAs help students complete assignments based on assigned readings. The instructor for the course would be responsible for overseeing the teaching assistants and preparing the course outline. The TAs would help guide the students in completing the assignments or mini projects. Then a couple of time a semester there would be larger projects that tie together what the students have learned.
[+] [-] davidbanham|11 years ago|reply
_yes_.
This seems so obvious to me. I am completely mystified as to why all universities seem to be ignoring it. I worry that it's just because videotaping lectures and putting them online is so much easier than actually re-evaluating the pedagogy.
[+] [-] kalid|11 years ago|reply
As a teaching tool, video doesn't lend itself to iterative refinement or discussion. It's an excellent audiovisual experience, but also a bet that the content is best delivered in a read-only format. (Practically, you can't update a video, only redo it -- presumably at full cost.)
I see video as a supplement to lesson formats that can be improved over time (text, or whatever medium comes next).
[+] [-] mattlutze|11 years ago|reply
I looked at a course like you describe for this semester. It looked fantastic, but I live in Europe and it was taught on the East coast of the US; I would have had to wake up at 2am my time to participate.
Last year I took a course that was almost entirely written -- the professor felt more comfortable if his lectures were written out, so he did so. The videos added flavor, but >90% of the content was there directly in the lecture for me to refer back to.
Having many ways to learn available -- lecture, reading, question/response, group work -- maximizes the chances a student's particular strengths will be matched in the course.
[+] [-] dagw|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|11 years ago|reply
What struck me this time was how much the emphasis is on practical software engineering rather than Lisp. That's what Ableson is so intensely passionate about in the video, not the theory. And so picking up the book and looking at the parallel text, I reread it in a whole new light. It was like rereading Eco's Name of the Rose after 25 years and not as the piece of pop fiction I thought it was the first time.
Which brings me to my point that video is just another communication channel. It conveys particular information efficiently and other information less efficiently. Text is no different. Without the video I would never have picked up that SICP and Code Complete have many similarities in subject matter and one just starts with a clean slate and the other in the messy middle.
Video does not need to be fancy to be effective. See Jeffery Ullman's Finite Automata on Coursera. It's PowerPoint and a small talking head and a red pen: And it's better than reading the book he wrote with Who because though dense, it's an order of magnitude less dense than the text.
On the other hand, University of Phoenix operated its online courses with NNTP and was reasonably interactive though asynchronous. It's a matter of curriculum development I suppose. Dan Grossman at University of Washington compares developing a MOOC to writing a textbook and that probably captures the domain of possibilities.
[+] [-] the_af|11 years ago|reply
My experience is based on 3 programming courses from Coursera: Functional Programming Principles in Scala, Reactive Programming, and Programming Languages. In all three cases, the videos did little to improve my understanding of the material, and I preferred the slides. Unfortunately, because the videos existed, the slides were (in general) less complete; I'd rather the videos did not exist and the written material was more complete instead.
Videos frustrate me because the lecturer goes too slowly or chooses to focus on the parts I find less interesting. And because it's pre-recorded, I cannot ask him/her questions. Yes, I can skip or fast-forward the video (in one course, I was so used to playing every lecture at max speed, I was surprised to find the lecturer's voice at normal speed sounded completely different :P ), but I find it so frustrating I'd rather be reading detailed text instead.
The embedded interactive quizzes are fun and motivating, but I wonder if the videos are needed at all.
[+] [-] brudgers|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benkant|11 years ago|reply
Hints and solutions can be time consuming to obtain at university (office hours) and might be impossible if you can't find instructor manuals for self-study.
Khan Academy makes the most sense to me. You work the problems until you can't, at which point you use the hints or watch the videos. Then continue.
The only lectures that were useful to me at university was the first one, where they discussed how the class would run, and the last one where they discussed the exam.
Labs and tutorials were useful if I wanted to get hints on how to work problems.
I agree with TFA. Videos should by no means be the focus. They can be very helpful demonstrations. If the goal is to be able to solve problems, that's what you should be spending the most time doing.
[+] [-] webwanderings|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] analog31|11 years ago|reply
Oddly enough, I found this to be the case, even in my humanities courses. I learned more about a subject by having to write about it, than from merely reading or memorizing for an exam.
[+] [-] rhino369|11 years ago|reply
I'm this way too, but I don't think everyone is. I think a successful program should include problem solving, reading, and audio/visual.
Because people learn differently.
[+] [-] rayiner|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arikrak|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bayesianhorse|11 years ago|reply
Another advantage is the subtle leakage of the instructor's opinions and thought processes. At least I perceive video to be slightly better in this regard.
[+] [-] petercooper|11 years ago|reply
That's great when you're refreshing or referencing, but when you're learning something from scratch, text presents an easier opportunity to "skim" and miss things than video which sorta decides the speed of the treadmill for you.
I'm the author of a book and the amount of queries I get that were answered on the previous page.. I think many people just don't read every word in books they read (but I sympathize, because neither do I).
[+] [-] ARothfusz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrbeal|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freehunter|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haberdasher|11 years ago|reply
I'm actively seeking feedback and testers in the education space!
[+] [-] kbrwn|11 years ago|reply
At the same time as this I took another course on a different website (coursera) Cloud Computing Concepts Part 1 which was entirely lecture based. The topic was extremely interesting to me and I have moved on to the next course in the series but I do find the all lecture format with quiz based homework to be less than ideal. I try to make up for the lack of a textbook by reading the documentation of concepts covered each week but often times it is hard to pick the most essential material.
The edx platform is really stunning in terms of engagement and feedback from a student perspective. It is easy to imagine a course presented on it with little to no lecture if a strong companion text was provided.
[+] [-] randomnumber53|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vacri|11 years ago|reply
Apart from 1971 having only nascent experience with educational videos, it's really hard to accept that the science videos of the 50s and 60s were no more effective at imparting information than a book. Seeing things move around as the presenter talks about them can really help to understand the topic.
It really depends on the topic that's being discusses - sometimes a video is better, sometimes a book is better, sometimes you absolutely have to get your hands dirty. You can read a book all you want and watch videos 'til the cows come home, but neither will make you proficient in tying a ligature.
I guess my problem with the statement is that it's absolutist. Some things are better in text, some things are better shown, some things are better done in person, not to mention other methods as well. Choose the appropriate tool for the job. And know your audience as well - the 'general public' is different to 'self-motivated autodidacts', for example.
[+] [-] karmicthreat|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rajacombinator|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ufo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bayesianhorse|11 years ago|reply
Some part of this is that text books tend to be written as reference material, and don't come with a "first learner's cut", a path through the material which is suited for someone just starting to learn the subject.
Videos are a medium which seems to be easier to master for university instructors than really good teaching texts. Don't ask me why...
[+] [-] mcbetz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MollyR|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmontra|11 years ago|reply