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XiXiDu comments on Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently - Less Wrong
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One might be underestimating the value that video lectures offer to certain people like myself. Reading a textbook demands to be proactive. If you are easily distracted, or don't really enjoy the subject, you have to force yourself to keep reading. In the case of video lectures you only have to bring yourself to start the video. Once the video is playing, your attention is naturally drawn to the ongoing action, whereas text is just inactive and has to be animated actively by the reader. Videos exhibit a tractive force, videos drag you along as they play.
That's interesting. I've never been able to watch video lectures for anything. I think speed is an issue. Reading, I can go at my own (fast) pace. I have a lot of randomly scattered general knowledge from past reading, so in textbooks there are bits and pieces I can skim over if I know I already understand those areas. With videos, the slower pace of speech feels dragging, and I can't tell without actually listening to the whole video whether or not I'm missing something. Videos might be an effective learning method, but for me they're less efficient. (Then again, I don't think distraction or disliking the subject has ever been my biggest problem when reading.)
You might want to try watching videos in a player that lets you adjust the speed, like VLC player. You still can't skim video as fast as text, but being able to apply a 2x speedup makes a lot of things much more watchable.
I ended up on this old thread, and just wanted to point out that most MOOCs now have players with adjustable speed. Not sure what was available 2 years ago.
Khan Academy really is amazing. I might write a post about how crazy effective Khan academy has been for my pupil. Mostly just by working through the practice exercises and watching the videos my (home-schooled) tutee has gone from struggling with long division to college level calculus in less than 6 months.
Just letting people see their progress (for math exercises) is really very motivating.
I'm excited about a related aspect of it, that usually gets overlooked: the Khan Academy guys can get fine-grained statistics over a large population to see what's working, what isn't, and to what degree. And they can vary things, doing A/B tests to figure out what problems or explanations or reward systems are the most useful for which clusters of students.
Looking at the sort of people they're hiring, I'd say this is pretty much inevitable, and I look forward to it.
The benefits of video learning - explained by Mr Khan at TED.