Slashdot Mirror
No Film At 11: the Case For the Less-Video-Is-More MOOC
theodp writes: In Why My MOOC is Not Built on Video, GWU's Lorena Barba explains why the Practical Numerical Methods with Python course she and colleagues put together has but one video: "Why didn't we have more video? The short answer is budget and time: making good-quality videos is expensive & making simple yet effective educational videos is time consuming, if not necessarily costly. #NumericalMOOC was created on-the-fly, with little budget. But here's my point: expensive, high-production-value videos are not necessary to achieve a quality learning experience." When the cost of producing an MOOC can exceed $100,000 per course, Barba suggests educators pay heed to Donald Bligh's 1971 observation that "dazzling presentations do not necessarily result in learning." So what would Barba do? "We designed the central learning experience [of #NumericalMOOC] around a set of IPython Notebooks," she explains, "and meaningful yet achievable mini-projects for students. I guarantee learning results to any student that fully engages with these!"
Since the summary didn't bother mentioning that tiny detail.
On YouTube that is pretty good... And I guarantee you that it didn't cost a hundred grand to make... You just need a camera - and a $200 Canon works great for this - and a good presenter. Guess what: good teachers usually make good presenters, and since you are already paying them to do that, that solves that problem. If you want to get really fancy, you can even spring for an external mic to clip onto the shirt they are wearing...
I have never been able to stand more than 5 minutes of a MOOC video before telling myself 'OK, I'll find a proper textbook.'.
I usually have a basic view of the MOOC topic ; at least the textbook allows me to skim it and dig deeper on the points that I'm interested in.
Just sitting at my desk and watching a video is usually boring and requires to watch the complete segment before realising it was not what I was looking for.
The same goes for all these video tutorials : why bother making a 5-min youtube video on some software installation when a one-page text with command lines would be appropriate?
I have never been able to stand more than 5 minutes of a MOOC video before telling myself 'OK, I'll find a proper textbook.'.
You take the words right out of my mouth. There are many subjects that are not well suited to a video presentation; in fact, in my view there are very few subjects that benefit much from combining graphics, talk and soundtrack. Perhaps if you can't appreciate a mathematical subject as it is presented in its dry text form, then it isn't something you are likely to ever understand - the beauty lies in the insight it provides, 'wow factor' should be irrelevant.
I think one of the problems with the video format is that it entices you into being passive; when you read proof in a book, you get stuck from time to time because there are things you don't understand, so you look up the things you don't understand etc, but in a video you are carried on without understanding, and although it is easy enough to stop and rewind, you tend not to because you are passively watching a video. Also, studies have shown that people tend to remember and understand less of presentations involving graphics, text and speaking, because the three forms crowd each other out.
making good-quality videos is expensive & making simple yet effective
Gah. Ampersand abuse is right up there with grocers' apostrophes. Burn the witch!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Frankly, I had to look up MOOC online too because it wasn't in my 1938 Webster or Corey Ford's Guide To Thimking [1961, Doubleday] , the computer reference I most often consult.
[...] some people started GOOgling it,
not knowing what it was,
and they'll continue GOOging it forever
just because This is the trend that never ends,
only the name does change my friend, [...]
It means eLearning or iBrainPodPeople or LearningMOO/MUD. It also means Learn-A-TRON or Learn-O-Matic. As you see on the oldest revisions of the Wiki, it was "founded on the theory of connectivism and an open pedagogy based on networked learning." From these huble 2011 origins it has gone on to have been founded on other things too. TIL In MOOC "every letter is negotiable," which means the shortest possible variant of it is "" the null set...
No biting satire intended, as one who never attended High School I welcome the advent of the online courses that can be realized for less than $100,000, whatever the cost. Along with Benny Hill I am learning all the time.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Reminds me of Pascal's quote of not having the time to write a shorter letter.
As a some-time presenter myself, and having the typical introverted personality (including slow speech due to all the thought processes going on to calculate the right way to say something), I have found that it takes quite a while to prepare a good presentation (non-boring and engaging, let alone one that the audience can learn something from). I would say at least 8 hours for a 40-minute presentation, but that is after some experience already. Longer gives me more time to prepare better.
I have seen quite a few tutorials and presentations where it seems the presenter hasn't spent much time planning the presentation through. First run through gets recorded and uploaded without too much editing either. To the point that I only watch a video to learn something as a last resort.
Other problem is of course in areas with buggy network connectivity, or very basic connectivity like much of the third world, video is all but impossible to use.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Do kids still wear this T-Shirt in college?
Most MOOC have a big problem. They don't educate a different kind of student. They educate the same highly motivated student. The only benefit is that student may not be able to afford a traditional college, or be able to read at a level required for college. It is a real benefit, but the nirvana.
Codeschool does a good job leveraging the strengths of the computer and targeting learning to those who were raised playing video games. Learning for non-traditional students involves active learning, not watching a guy on video.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Just took a Stanford MOOC on statistical learning. The best part of the course was the PDF textbook that the authors made available free of charge. The videos served to reinforce what I had already read in the textbook, and were by no means a substitute for actually reading the book. But I did appreciate them.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Amen Brother! If I wanted to sit through a few hours of bad powerpoint every week, I wouldn't have gone into engineering.
After getting burned on a couple of online courses, I discovered the affordable and approachable Dover books on mathematics and computing. They seem to fit my attention span and learning style better, where I might have to spend a lot of time thinking about a short passage or an equation to understand what's important about it. They're also easier to read when I'm on a plane or at the gym.
Easy Online Role Playing Campaign Management
The cost of producing a large amount of well-thought out, cohesive, modular, high-visual-quality video is in the labor, not the cost of the tech. What the professor is saying is that she doesn't have the time to write 200 hours of script (or even write out 200 hours worth of detailed notes), record the 200 hours (which'll take more than that to record - no-one can do 200 hours of high-quality video on the first take), go back and edit stuff (even just cutting out uhms & ahs takes long than you think - step 1 will be to re-watch the 200 hours of video to find them :) ), etc, etc.
The $100,000 figure struck me as being weird, as well, but the professor's point is that producing 10 hours of video for each of 20 lessons in addition to all the other course materials is way, way too much to just demand that someone do.
Besides, for stuff like this you mostly want a good book anyways. Something that you can read a short paragraph of, stop and think about for a bit, come back and re-read in order to make sure that you got it, read another paragraph the same way, maybe work through a problem or two. Videos of this would be nice, but they're window-dressing around the main event.
I find the MOOC format very suitable for my needs and I have consumed dozens. The lecture is a very different format from a book and is intended for very different purposes. Like most people, I prefer lectures to begin with and move to books for further detail.
> requires to watch the complete segment before realising it was not what I was looking for.
Videos are not meant for piece meal consumption, for stuff you already know... more or less... and are of course not intended for information lookup, if that is how you have been using them. You don't attend a classroom to look for stuff. An online course is no different. You attend it when you make a full commitment to learn a topic as defined by the lecturer.
What I don't understand is: How is your problem with MOOCs any different from any Distance Education lecture delivery, Great Lectures or simply classroom format (with a large enough audience where you cannot interrupt the Prof to ask questions). You could say: just read the book for all of those as well. Do you just dislike lectures in general? Would you say that Feynman lectures are a waste of time when you could have simply read a book?
> Perhaps if you can't appreciate a mathematical subject as it is presented in its dry text form, then it isn't something you are likely to ever understand
I dunno. I find animations of mathematical concepts to be quite effective in communicating the intuition behind them, much better than text.
Perhaps, you just haven't seen good use of multimedia.
> I think one of the problems with the video format is that it entices you into being passive
I prefer videos over lectures. The reason is that I can pause them, replay them, for technical stuff, try things out.
You might say: Well, you can do that with a book. For me, the lecture uses a more approachable language than the more formal format of the book (good for further exploration and lookups). A video demonstration is just more compact and more effective because it is multi-modal, than the full description in text.
> because the three forms crowd each other out.
In a well-done presentation, they are complementary... multi-modal.
The real problem is inappropriate use of media.
Video, text, pictures/photos all are appropriate, depending on what you're doing.
A picture or illustration is ideal if you need to show something visual - like a map. Doing so in words makes text verbose and inevitably, unclear. (Remember the saying a picture is worth a thousand words?). however, that doesn't mean you simply put up a gallery with no explanatory text. Pictures don't convey actions, but they help illustrate. A tutorial showing screenshots with explanatory steps between each screenshot is way more useful than a tutorial without (even ASCII art is still an illustration), or a tutorial consisting of just pictures.
Likewise, video has its place. It's use is to show people an action. Not action as in "click this button", but complex actions that cannot be shown by a mere image and explanatory text. Perhaps a part is particularly hard to remove and requires a tricky amount of manipulation - text and illustrations help, but it should ALSO be supplemented with a video showing it visually. Note: you need ALL THREE methods for this - video alone is insufficient. Text with video isn't sufficient either (you cannot follow the text and video simultaneously), and video and pictures isn't sufficient either (see text and images).
Oh, and no, videos must be properly produced with proper sound tracks and narration. And even more importantly, angles must be the same between the illustration and video. Sorry, but if the only place you can film from is upside down, then you should show your illustrations from that POV as well so users can correlate the illustration with the action. If alternative POVs are more appropriate, you must illustrate the POV shown in the video so users do not waste the entire time trying to figure out the POV.
Text is descriptive. It tells what to do.
Illustrations, photos, pictures are visual. They show things at static points in time and are useful tor pointing out, illustrating actions, or providing visual information.
Videos show action that cannot be captured by mere text nor illustrations. Perhaps a location is tricky to get to - a drawing can show you where it is, but it can't show you how to get there or what you should see. (Not without a lot of shots sequentially taken, that is). Oh, and videos must be long enough to show a lead in (how you got there), the action, and a lead out. Jumping right into the action is bad when viewers are trying to orient themselves at first. If you're showing a jumping action to reach a hidden room, you need to start from a familiar room, pause there for a couple of seconds to let viewers get bearings by showing landmarks, then proceed.
Truth is, you need all three media to teach or do anything effectively. The real problem is too much over-reliance of one medium or another - typically too much video, not enough text nor illustrations. No media is perfect - they all have their shortcomings and one cannot be substituted for another.
Text is always a must. If anything it's the backbone of the whole thing and it serves to tie the other media together to form the cohesive unit of what you're trying to communicate. You cannot use the other media without text. Next level up is illustrations, pictures, photos, and other static displays. Again, text must tie together the visual display - the visual cannot exi
I applaud Ms. Lorena's determination to keep the cost of her video to the absolute minimum
[...]
It is thus advisable for one to adopt the moderate approach --- and try to avoid the two extremes
Read again (my emphasis):
The short answer is budget and time: making good-quality videos is expensive & making simple yet effective educational videos is time consuming, if not necessarily costly.
Making videos takes a lot of time and/or money -- often both. Even if you keep monetary costs to a minimum, the time expense is still huge. And what do you have at the end of it? Video is a write-once, read-many medium and it's very tricky to go back and revise any errors -- look at some of the heavily repeated courses on Coursera (for example Dan Grossman's University of Washington Programming Languages course) and you'll see corrections patched onto previously-live slidecasts, annotations overlaid onto live code windows and on-screen comments about things the presenter said wrong. Video you either get right first time, or its wrong for all time.
Furthermore, the big elephant in the room is how MOOCs claim that the lecture is ineffective and dead... and then simply put the lecture in a different form. It is very difficult to embed interactive learning into a passive medium like video, and you get many courses that tell you to stop the video and go and do something else... not much good when you've downloaded the video for offline viewing in the provider's own app, and you don't actually have access to that something else.
From TFA:
Despite their popularity in MOOCs and flipped classrooms, “lecture videos” have the same pitfalls as regular lectures: they provide a false sense of clarity and are utterly forgettable.
Exactly -- there are much better things we could be doing with our time.
Barba makes a heck of a lot of important points, and I think anyone writing an online course should read the article.
I'd like to add one observation, though. She doesn't talk about personalised learning. When I go into a MOOC and it has lots of information that I already know, it's either integrated into the videos so that I have no choice but to watch, or its in an "optional" video that (despite being optional) sits in my to-do list either until I load and cancel it, or the course website closes. The path doesn't adapt to my knowledge. And with video, it couldn't even if it wanted to -- dynamically editing and mixing custom videos with alternative explanations etc would be a huuuuuge task.
Dynamic text, on the other hand, is mostly a solved problem, so adaptive courses are reasonably easy to make. Yet video distracts us from the real goal.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'