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.
Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video
31–40 of 92 posts
Re: Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video
#32I 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. Unf…
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.
Re: Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video
#33I 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!
Re: Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
100% agree with this. What makes me really scratch my head is that I talk to people regularly who prefer this! If I have to watch a video to answer my question, I'll just figure it out some other way.
Completely agree with the above sentiments, but that's not the end of the idiodicy. There are people who will link a video to make their argument. Not only are they unwilling (and usually unable) to put it in their own words, they won't even link a text article that does it for them.
So they expect me to watch a commercial and 3 minutes of video, when all they had to convey was a very concise point like "democrats offered to make 90% of the requested cuts, and the other side is shutting down the government over the last ten." But I "absolutely" must watch the video, with no summary of the point because "[my congresscritter hero] totally proves you wrong".
... and have the full support of the other reddit posters. F--- that.
Re: Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video
#35There 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 h…
I'm a little surprised at the strong support this comment has driven. Haha, I usually use this account for opinions that I would think controversial.
Re: Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video
#36Simply: 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…
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…
Despite being relatively early and ad hoc, Khan academy got it mostly right: don't just tape someone giving a lecture; give a close up of the instructor writing out the logical profession of ideas. In a classroom, it's too hard to do it fast enough; they either have to write very little, or use static slides. Khan wisely used the virtual whiteboard, in effect, to accelerate the writing speed while having infinite space and instant jump-around.
I still prefer the mostly-webpages approach, but Khan definitely did a lot more to make use of the format than "dump a camcorder in a lecture hall".
Re: Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video
#37Simply: 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…
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.
Re: Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Pausing and thinking is extremely distracting. I've always feel like I tend to gloss over the details whenever I'm watching the videos, along the opposite that I'm being bored and distracted because it's too slow. Since both could happen in the same speed, moving speed up and down is not an option.
> I tend to gloss over the details whenever I'm watching the videos
That's not necessarily a bad thing. If you think about how many times your reading is slowed down because you feel you have to re-read a passage to 'get it', audio/video sources totally help do away with that. It may sound like that weakens your learning, but if you've ever researched anything on improving reading speed, you'll know that it's better to not focus on 'getting' things on the first pass anyway, and instead continue plowing through the entire content just trying to get the jist of it, relying on multiple passes to really understand things better instead (this probably works for the same reasons spaced-repetition works). Obviously you can do that with reading as that's where the tip originated, but clearly auditory/visual input helps facilitate that if only because rewinding is less tempting than re-reading due to it being a chore.
> along the opposite that I'm being bored and distracted because it's too slow
Seems like a personal preference thing. To me, I get this with reading as well. It's just not stimulating enough for me, even when I read fast, cause it's easy for competing thoughts to take over and distract me.
Audio/video on the other hand, work for me precisely because I can't think with that much stimulation going on. I'm too busy listening and watching to really have the resources to process any distracting thoughts, so it's easier to focus.
Just my $0.02
Re: Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video
#39There 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 h…
I'm a little surprised at the strong support this comment has driven. Haha, I usually use this account for opinions that I would think controversial.
I see this opinion voted to the top of Hacker News all the time. People seem to forget that watching something in video format is just so damn convenient, and requires little effort.
Re: Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video
#40In 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.