No Film At 11: the Case For the Less-Video-Is-More MOOC 87
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!"
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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, ann
MOOC = massive open online course (Score:5, Informative)
Since the summary didn't bother mentioning that tiny detail.
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Ooh, it took quite long for a troll to come at me for not remembering the acronym. :)
Can't say i read that much about such courses to remember the acronym (although after looking it up it did sound familiar). If you feel that's enough to have a go at me, good for you, you must feel really special and good right now
*enough feeding trolls*
Re:MOOG = massive open online synthesis (Score:4, Informative)
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] [amazon.com], 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 [wikipedia.org] of the Wiki [wikipedia.org], 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 [wikipedia.org]," 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 [youtube.com].
Re:MOOC = massive open online course (Score:5, Insightful)
The proper response is "Oh sorry, I take this acronym for granted and forgot that general readers may not understand it," not a snide, dickhead response.
Here's an acronym that might benefit you though: LTW
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I honestly though it was some new sort of online game when I saw that acronym. I've seen it a few times before, but it's not common enough that I remember it. Whoever wrote the summary made the all-too-common mistake of assuming everyone understands the acronyms that they take for granted. That really goes against the advice of the APA-PM.
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I did know that, but why is it referred to as "an MOOC" in TFS ? Shouldn't it be a MOOC
and does MOOC rhyme with kook ?
"Barba suggests educators pay heed to Donald Bligh's 1971 observation"
I must have missed that particular Mutiny on the Bounty film
Re:MOOC = massive open online course (Score:4, Informative)
There's a lot of stuff (Score:5, Informative)
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...
Re: There's a lot of stuff (Score:1)
The other students are the worst part of MOOCs. I've taken a number of them, and any sort of discussion forum that's offered quickly becomes a place where people from developing nations beg for special treatment. They want sumbission deadlines (every single one of them!) extended because of obscure "religious days of significance". They want exams to be optional. They demand their certificates/diplomas, before the course has ended (or sometimes before it even has begun!) and without fulfilling any of the re
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Hah. I have seen a bit of what you mean and I cringed myself. I am from a developing country (and studied in the West). Its just that the educational culture is a bit different over here. Students can get rather needy. Project work expectations are pretty low here (unlilke test performance) and they might be having a harder time to adjust. Its probably not a bad idea to have regional realms of some sort, so that students of similar cultures can participate, without stepping on other's toes.
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This. The class I'm taking right now has videos that consist entirely (except for the intro) of the professor writing on the screen with a Wacom tablet. It's exactly like watching a lecture, except the whiteboard is a computer. By the way, I've previously taken an in-person class taught by the same guy [when I was an undergrad], so when I say it's the same I know what I'm talking about.
Cost = Labor, not tech (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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FTA: "Their recommendations to make videos better are sound (keep them short, informal, etc.), but the overall emphasis is too much on the instruction, and too little on the student—which is where learning really happens."
It doesn't matter how good your videos look if the teacher is the one doing all the interesting work. Shift the load to the students in creative ways; they'll do the learning.
No video post? (Score:2, Troll)
Call me an old guy with a short attention span but (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Call me an old guy with a short attention span (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Call me an old guy with a short attention span (Score:4, Insightful)
> 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.
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For me, the lecture uses a more approachable language than the more formal format of the book (good for further exploration and lookups).
Yup, and the reason that the lecture survives to this day is because people speak more naturally and use a lot more supportive redundancy. Natural redundancy tends to be edited out of books on the erroneous grounds of being needless repetition. Natural pacing is lost too, and the text becomes too dense.
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.
A video has the potential to be more effective because it is multimodal, but it also has the potential to do more harm than good, which brings us back to the thrust of the article -- doing video properly take
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Well, of course, there are good and bad lectures and lecture videos.
> Well done presentations are the exception -- don't try to build a rule on them.
I am not sure I agree. I have been satisfied with the quality of video lectures in MOOCs. I expect MOOC videos (I just use Coursera) to be better than simple lecture videos that I was accustomed to in the pre-MOOC era. M is for Massive. So I do expect that better care is taken in their production.
> which brings us back to the thrust of the article -- doin
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Well, of course, there are good and bad lectures and lecture videos.
> Well done presentations are the exception -- don't try to build a rule on them.
I am not sure I agree. I have been satisfied with the quality of video lectures in MOOCs. I expect MOOC videos (I just use Coursera) to be better than simple lecture videos that I was accustomed to in the pre-MOOC era. M is for Massive. So I do expect that better care is taken in their production.
We're clearly coming from different places. I studied for a degree and a half with the Open University in the UK, and their production qualities were top class. The other notable thing about the OU was how little of the material was actually in video form -- typically you'd get 6 books, 4 tapes/CDs and 1 VHS tape/DVD for each course. The video was designed with very specific points in mind, and a lot of it would be interviews. Most of the core learning material was in the books.
> which brings us back to the thrust of the article -- doing video properly takes more time than it's worth
We have an article because these lecturers are the exception (IPython Notebooks are quite good teaching tools though). If I wanted a simple presentation with no expectation of effort on media, I'd normally just go download some course lectures from iTunesU.
A good presentation does not need a whole lot of effort. A screen cast format is not bad at all. It can involve slides, live code building, refer to web resources, screen drawing etc. That's pretty multi-modal and does not need a complex set up.
A good presentation needs a p
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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.
The article talks about videos, a small subset of multimedia, and the same can be said about animations. Good use of multimedia IMO tends to be when you insert illustrations into a mainly textual context; these illustrations can themselves be animations, video clips or soundbites. The reason this works is that you are still the one that does the work by reading the text, and the illustrations serve to support the meaning of the text; but if the whole thing was produced as a video, you would in a sense outso
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I agree wholeheartedly. I think audio works as a medium exactly because it is so limited; you only have the soundtrack, so you are forced express yourself well to sucessfully communicate the meaning. I have suffered through enough of these tele-conferences with demonstrations of software transmitted to multiple sites, to know how much it distracts, when the presenter struggles with bad technology, and on top of that had rather hoped that the demonstration would compensate for the lack of clear, verbal commu
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A few months ago I did the "Introduction to functional programming" MOOC on edX. At first I thought that I would hate watching videos. But what worked for me was:
After a while it became even fun and relaxing to watch the videos
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No you're not alone, videos everywhere are the reason I just don't touch MOOCs despite having done lots of graduate and post-graduate study in my spare time. One would think I'd be the ideal target audience for an MOOC given that I was happy doing distance learning before it became cool, but the proliferation of videos makes it impossible for me via the new hip MOOC organisations like EdX.
I just don't have time to prat around pre-loading videos onto my mobile devices, I don't have a consistent enough mobile
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"why bother making a 5-min youtube video on some software installation when a one-page text with command lines would be appropriate?"
Because not everyone is you? (Having said that I would recommend a target length of under 5min)
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Harsh. Tell a student to do Linux from scratch, he will find it intimidating. I assume most failed in the first few attempts, back when they was no video option. Show him a video of it once, he will find it much less intimidating. Video has its place.
Another thing is: you need "good written instructions", as you say. Not everyone can write good instructions. But just about anyone can show. Creating install videos does not require as much skill because a lot of information is informally and implicitly encode
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Amen.
The kids these days seem to ENJOY watching how to play their favourite games better, or do their make-up prettier, or whatever using the slowest possible delivery method.
Give me a plain-text document, top to bottom with copious examples. Give me an image for those bits that absolutely need it. Make it a still from a video if you must. And give me a 2 minute video of what you're trying to demonstrate if it really can't be put into words.
Other than that, I just don't get it.
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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 ra
Not the medium, but the execution (Score:2)
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?
Depends. I've taken quite a few via coursera, and that experience you describe, I've had it with some courses, but not others. Odersky's classes in Scala or Andrew Ng's courses in machine learning have been very nice, and I don't feel like I'm missing anything I could do with a proper text book.
OTH, I'v had other courses on the same venue that I simply could not stand.
So, it is not the medium, it is the execution.
The same applies to books in the good old brick-n-mortar world. Some textbooks take you
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The thing that made Ng's machine learning course really good was his focus on "intuitions" -- a common sense description of how the task works and why -- before getting down to the fine detail. Collins's NLP course presented lots of technical information without adequately demonstrating how, when or why it was applicable. Jurafsky's NLP course dealt, like Ng, with the whys before the hows. Jurafsky's videos were better than his book, actually, as he slipped into the same trap of too-much-technical-informati
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Re:Call me an old guy with a short attention span (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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 tha
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Of course, this is VERY HARD WORK. Most people are lazy which is why we get the crap we do. It takes real work to put together something appropriate and it cannot be slap-dashed together in a few hours.
That's not it at all -- most people just don't know how to structure videos, and right now the orthodox line is just "stand in front of a camera and show a couple of slides, film it, and stick it on the net". Nobody's training teachers to do this stuff right -- they're just expected to do it.
Videos in online courses (Score:2)
I hate videos anyway, you need sound to watch them, and except for simple animations showing 'interesting' stuff they are the slowest way to transport knowledge. Both in 'preparing/making' as in watching.
Reading a good piece is 10 times faster than watching a movie.
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I hate videos anyway, you need sound to watch them, and except for simple animations showing 'interesting' stuff they are the slowest way to transport knowledge. Both in 'preparing/making' as in watching.
True story: I wanted to find out about the "heal tool" in the GIMP and figure out what it actually did. I wound up on a highly rated "how to use the heal tool" video, which I figured at least might show me how to get good or acceptable results from it.
Nope. Here's what the video content was, narrated in a m
True enough (Score:1)
You can see all kinds of youtube "tutorials" for stuff that used to be described in a few lines of text and maybe one or two screenshots. Which sucks because it takes much longer and is a problem when you have no sound.
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They don't even really work for English.
Whoosh yet again MOOCs... (Score:1, Insightful)
this is the other end of the swing, the pendulum all the way to the right again. Here is what MOOCs do wrong...
One or the other. Massively imbalanced. Without the use of textbooks, students need solid examples and reading created by the course creators. With all that text they need an instructor showing them examples and explaining what can be intimidating to students in more friendly ways.
its not supposed to be aimed at autodidacts, they can teach themselves from books already. Its not supposed to be aimed
Great (Score:2)
When working on some of the online courses from Udacity I really found it arduous to listen to and watch the videos they posted. The tone of voice used was also kind of annoying.
Just sitting and reading about the concepts is faster, also actually working on the problems provide more education than just listening. I feel that a lot of the harder concepts in GPU computing could have been covered with a small introduction to Monoids , Semi-groups and Groups and those concepts could be better understood in writ
No time for spelling out words! (Score:3)
making good-quality videos is expensive & making simple yet effective
Gah. Ampersand abuse is right up there with grocers' apostrophes. Burn the witch!
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Yeah... bout as bloody ignorant as them bloody Romans who invented the bloody thing thousands of years ago.
(You do realise that & is an older letter than K and Z, right...?)
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Yeah... bout as bloody ignorant as them bloody Romans who invented the bloody thing thousands of years ago.
(You do realise that & is an older letter than K and Z, right...?)
What's that got to do with anything?
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Yeah... bout as bloody ignorant as them bloody Romans who invented the bloody thing thousands of years ago.
(You do realise that & is an older letter than K and Z, right...?)
What's that got to do with anything?
Well, how is abuse to follow a language convention that existed before there was even an English language band which has been part of English since long before printing presses &c existed. There is nothing "abusive" in it -- it's just that it's not the way you perssonally write.
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It's not the way people generally write, and certainly isn't how formal text is written. The ampersand is usually reserved/recommended for specific, named joinings - Hall & Oates, Smith & Wesson, <third example that escapes me at the moment>. It's not a general purpose drop-in replacement for the word "and."
As for it being "abuse," well... you may not have noticed, but my original post wasn't entirely serious.
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It's not a general purpose drop-in replacement for the word "and."
That's just fashion. It's like telling someone they shouldn't have three buttons on their suit cuff.
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No, it's convention. It's like telling someone they're not going to make a brilliant impression as an undertaker if they keep wearing their Elmo tie to work.
the case against (Score:1)
none of this crap works, if anything it's making USA dumber.
http://thelearningcurve.pearso... [pearson.com]
14th in the world isn't exactly a glowing endorsement.
Time to prepare (Score:3)
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.
Other than salary, how the hell $100,000 (Score:2)
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The great courses company does seem to have some pretty good production where they have a camera man, and at least one animator. The lighting is pretty good and I suspect that there is lots of editing. But those might be some of the h
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How the hell is it costing $100,000 per course? Most coursera courses are just some guy talking to a webcam or a fixed camera. Most of the stanford courses(many very good) are just a guy working a camera from the back of the class with the instructor miked up. So unless the check boxes on the quizzes cost $200 each something is fishy with this number.
As per the article, "This is probably a somewhat overindulgent price for appearance, rather than substance." IE. the author believes her sources have rounded up for shock value.
No, its the case for whining (Score:2)
If you don't want to watch the video -for whatever reason- almost all of the courses provide the text of the close captioning. Download and read that along with any other lecture notes that are available. Better yet, just troll Amazon for the "best" book on the subject as that is all you really want anyway.
The rest of us, who actually do want the video because, have among many reasons, a) we find the pace to be more conducive to long term learing, b) we like to take notes while we listen, c) (course depe
Video and audio are time-rate fixed (Score:2)
When you absorb inf
*BEEP* (Score:2)
As a youngin' in the early-mid 90s, we would watch these slide shows *BEEP*
These had corresponding audio tapes, that would tell to change the slide with a *BEEP*
Can't remember what topics, and they were always boring as *BEEP*
Only useful for taking a quick nap or being amused when the teacher didn't change the slide *BEEP*
Just changing to video over slides doesn't fix the underlying lack of interactivity or entertainment to keep the students stimulated. *BEEP BEEP*