Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video • Hacker News Board

Re: Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video

#71

Post by rprospero » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 12:40 PM UTC

bramgg wrote: post #39

douche wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure that I see the convenience. When I click on a link and it's text, I can just start reading it. If it's video, I either need to dig out a pair of headphones or get up and go to another room, so as not to disturb my officemates. It's far more convenient to just click the back button and find a text link.

Similarly, when I'm reading text and a message (e.g. email, IM) comes in, I can switch over to the other program, reply to the message, switch back to my browser, and the text is right where I left it. With video, there's no such guarantee. Also, I've never come back to a text document and needed to sit and wait while it buffered again.

I can easily alternate between four or five different text documents, taking each a paragraph of two at a time, and still follow what it happening in each one. This may be a personal deficiency, but I've never been able to do that with videos.

Re: Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video

#72

Post by petercooper » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 12:46 PM UTC

jghn wrote: post #12

freehunter wrote: post #6

Earlier 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.

I prefer it. Here's why. When Googling for specific details of something, I inevitably end up with 1001 automatically generated pages from the wrong data which are plastered with ads and other crap. With YouTube, I might have to watch a video, but the interface is consistent and I know that in most cases someone's had to put effort into actually showing me the right answer. If the textual Web were all put together by humans with answers, it'd be better, but it isn't :-(

Of course, if the answer to something is on Wikipedia, it's a win. But Wikipedia isn't designed to be an encyclopedia of all human knowledge (sadly).

Re: Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video

#73

Post by cpks » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 12:48 PM UTC

jghn wrote: post #12

freehunter wrote: post #6

Earlier 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.

It depends on context.

First-order:

* At a computer ==> Text * Commuting ==> Audio/video

Second-order depends on things like type of content, cognitive load, etc.

Re: Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video

#74

Post by petercooper » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 12:51 PM UTC

arikrak wrote: post #31

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 represe…

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).

Re: Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video

#75

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 12:58 PM UTC

rprospero wrote: post #71

bramgg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure that I see the convenience. When I click on a link and it's text, I can just start reading it. If it's video, I either need to dig out a pair of headphones or get up and go to another room, so as not to disturb my officemates. It's far more convenient to just click the back button and find a text link. Similarly, when I'm reading text and a message (e.g. email, IM) comes in, I can switch over to the othe…

Another aspect: people generally get to the point a lot faster in text, or you can skim/search to the point. (It may be surrounded by adverts, clickbait, or gifs, but at least it's there).

But so many videos are unedited. Some guy rambling about stuff, advertising himself or his social media presence, while slowly setting up whatever the actual point of the video is. Possibly this is because editing takes skill (which most people don't have) and tooling (video editing software is hard and/or expensive).

The last time I had to get information out of a video because there was no other source was for a minor car repair issue. It was useful to see which screws to undo and how the parts come apart and go back together. But that was one minute of a ten minute video.

The "rule of 30%" (immediately skip the video to 30% in) helps quite a lot.

Re: Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video

#76

Post by jsuar » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 1:16 PM UTC

metasean wrote: post #69

reacweb wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you watch a video, you lose the freedom of the rate. People do not like to lose freedom.

This isn't completely true. I frequently will download all the videos for an online course. Subsequently, when I watch them in VLC [1], I'll bump the playback to 1.25x - 1.75x. Fwiw: for me, playback speed strongly correlates to how technical the topic is, less technical videos tends toward the 1.75x; while highly technical tends toward the 1.25x. I'm also a big proponent of subtitles and transcripts. [1]: http://www…

I'm glad you brought this up. This has tremendously improved my experience with video lectures. For online classes, I do the same as you mentioned utilizing VLCs playback feature. Youtube's addition of playback speed has also been a huge improvement in consuming more technical content.

Re: Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video

#77

Post by learnstats2 » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 1:48 PM UTC

douche wrote: post #35

douche wrote: post #27

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 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 don't know that this is really a controversial viewpoint.

Video is one of the worst ways to learn. Anecdotally, think of times at high school when a teacher has put on a video: it's typically to distract the students so that the teacher can have some time out from interacting. It has a similar function to leaving a baby in front of The Happy Little Elves. It's better than having no stimulus, but no serious learning is expected from that.

Although the article says "Watching videos is not better (or worse) than sitting through lectures", I would even disagree with that. A good lecturer has the opportunity to gauge the audience and adjust their lecture depending on how many students are throwing paper aeroplanes (or looking lost). This just doesn't happen with video.

Re: Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video

#78

Post by the_af » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 2:10 PM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #32

the_af wrote: post #3

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. 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.

Wouldn't reading the source material (and copying from there) be even better for Norvig's ten year plan? Note that the pace of brick and mortar classes drove me mad back in my student days :)

Also, the deadlines from Coursera and most MOOCs conspire against watching videos at normal speed. Most of us have day jobs and the only time we can read the lectures and do the exercises is a few hours a day, late at night. In that case, speed-watching and focusing only on the most interesting parts are the only options, especially if you want to get full credits for the course. (Of course, you can take the more relaxed approach of simply not caring about the credits, and getting things done at whatever pace you find comfortable, and that's completely valid!)

Re: Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video

#79

Post by the_af » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 2:16 PM UTC

rohitarondekar wrote: post #42

karmacondon wrote: post #4

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…

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.

Yes! I find Dan Grossman a good teacher, but his extremely slow speaking rythm drove me mad. I had to fast forward his lectures at max speed, and even then I ended up skipping them entirely.

No disrespect meant for Prof. Grossman. His course was very interesting and, as you said, the course notes were so good the videos were completely redundant.

Re: Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video

#80

Post by noir_lord » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 2:40 PM UTC

talkingquickly wrote: post #61

bramgg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the counter view here is that video can be incredibly inconvenient depending on your exact use case. E.g. my scarcest resource is time and video is, for me at least, a very slow way of consuming content (compared to text). So if it's content that I need to consume quickly, video is a none starter. If I'm browsing the web, I'm already reading textual content so reading is about as low effort as can be. Watchin…

One thing I do is use VLC and it's ability to speed up content without altering pitch.

I wish there was a more fluent way to control the playback speed (Fn Key and Mouse Scroll) but otherwise it works well.

Really handy for podcasts that while interesting tend to be a bit slow.

EDIT: Just checked new version, you can display the speed bar by showing status bar, clicking it and then hovering cursor and using scroll wheel, missed that before.