Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video

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.

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.

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.

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.