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Show HN: Anki/Duolingo-like app using educational YouTube videos

platoedu.org

61–70 of 102 posts

Re: Show HN: Anki/Duolingo-like app using educational YouTube videos

#61

I've always wanted to do this for Wikipedia, it could even be a Wikimedia add-on. However, I have recently transitioned towards becoming better at compiling information quickly rather than spending a chunk of my day memorizing facts that I am not quite sure will be useful.

I’ve been doing something similar. If I read a blog post / paper, etc. where I learn a lot on a topic I’m interested in, I will catalogue a pdf of it in Obsidian with a tag and an optional note. This makes it easy to access information locally very quickly and I find I learn a lot more because if I forget something, I open up the resource, read the doc and, come out learning a little more. A kind of convoluted version of spaced-repetition but more passive learning.

Granted, I’m aware this probably won’t scale to many topics but a few years and hundreds of notes later, it’s still working well for me.

Re: Show HN: Anki/Duolingo-like app using educational YouTube videos

#63
post #57

I like the idea. I’m learning European Portuguese, so I added a video but unfortunately got an error that there were no subtitles. The subtitles for the video in question are auto-generated, so maybe that’s the reason? Would be great if I could use this for foreign language studies.

What exactly are you looking to do with YouTube and language? I might have a github repo you could be interested in. It takes YouTube videos, creates transcripts, translations and creates audio anki flash cards from it with audio on the front and text on the back

Re: Show HN: Anki/Duolingo-like app using educational YouTube videos

#64
post #25

This is amazing! I tried a couple of videos and the questions seem pretty relevant and answerable (is there a better word for how a question is worded clearly and the provided answers seem clearly distinct and one of them is obviously correct), which is really hard to do by hand, much less by AI. I know you've addressed the video selection in the playlists, but I would highly suggest doing something to get it to diff…

"educational entertainment" videos are way too many, way too popular and binge-able - much more recommended by YT's AI. Actual education are much harder to discover on YouTube. I have been wanting to build a YT front-end that lets me control how many "new" videos are recommended. New videos are the time-sinks. Instead this new FE should make me re-watch so I absorb and retain better - maybe thru more Q&A like OP's pl…

This. I don't think most educational content on YouTube is worth remembering (or the best way to spend your time in the first place).

So I'd be cautious about an app that helps you memorize the contents of said videos. You might end up with a lot of superficial, clickbaity pieces of knowledge.

Re: Show HN: Anki/Duolingo-like app using educational YouTube videos

#65

This is amazing! I tried a couple of videos and the questions seem pretty relevant and answerable (is there a better word for how a question is worded clearly and the provided answers seem clearly distinct and one of them is obviously correct), which is really hard to do by hand, much less by AI. I know you've addressed the video selection in the playlists, but I would highly suggest doing something to get it to diff…

Thank you!! Yes, this is actually something I've been thinking about quite a bit, I actually built out the playlist feature just this morning because it's easier to "show" how Plato works, but I basically just wrote some scripts to get some good enough videos for the demo If you have any good channel suggestions I'd love to add them :)) One of the things I have on the backburner for now is building a BERT classifier…

> classifier to decide whether the video is Educational, Edu-tainment, or not educational at all

I'm a bit surprised to only see like 3 questions for a 14 minute video of quantum mechanics. For educational videos with very dense information, is there a way to raise the questions per video rate?

Looking forward to see MIT OpenCourseware videos supported. Right now they are too long :D

Re: Show HN: Anki/Duolingo-like app using educational YouTube videos

#66

What algorithm do you use for spaced repetition?

I have a fairly simple implementation of the SM-2 algorithm, and just making the assumption that if you answered the question correctly then you have “perfect recall”. This isn’t exactly correct but I have been using it myself and seems to still be pretty nice. But for the next version I want to use something called knowledge tracing to determine an estimated level of recall to then change the spacing

I recommend the new algorithm of Anki: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki

Re: Show HN: Anki/Duolingo-like app using educational YouTube videos

#68
I love this!

I wanted to build a “yt-campus” with a curated list of educational youtube channels.

This does it better, thank you.

One thing you could consider: allow your community to discuss the video’s. I’ve always wanted to have higher quality discussions about the Engineering videos I watch, and the YouTube comments really disappoint. Would you consider adding that? How about keeping your own personal notes per video?

Re: Show HN: Anki/Duolingo-like app using educational YouTube videos

#70
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"educational entertainment" videos are way too many, way too popular and binge-able - much more recommended by YT's AI. Actual education are much harder to discover on YouTube. I have been wanting to build a YT front-end that lets me control how many "new" videos are recommended. New videos are the time-sinks. Instead this new FE should make me re-watch so I absorb and retain better - maybe thru more Q&A like OP's pl…

This. I don't think most educational content on YouTube is worth remembering (or the best way to spend your time in the first place). So I'd be cautious about an app that helps you memorize the contents of said videos. You might end up with a lot of superficial, clickbaity pieces of knowledge.

I invite you to share your own superior knowledge to the masses via your own YouTube videos so we can learn from you. Until then, I’ll learn from what is made available for others. Post back here once you’ve created some better content so we know where to look.
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