Feb 19, 2012

Videos on the internet need a speedup option!

I have been amazed by the recent revolution brought on by internet videos especially in the field of learning. And this seems to be changing the way knowledge is disseminated along the whole spectrum: from elementary school level to PhD level.

MIT, Stanford and other schools have started online courses free of cost. As far as I know, the difference from putting the recorded lectures online is that there will be a different type of the user/learner’s interaction with the video and media in the former compared to passive TV-like interaction with video lectures in the latter. At the same time, channels like Youtube, Videolectures-dot-net and others, thanks to the speedy internet of 201X, have made even the recorded video lectures more widely available than ever before.

So let me focus on the recorded video lectures of different courses. I recently found via the youtube pages, that NPTEL, an Indian initiative, is quite popular for engineering learning. So are several MIT, UCB, Stanford videos. Nice. I guess the onus of learning, is now, just limited by our own motivation and needs rather than our ability to attend institutes of higher education. One thing I and a lot of others would like to have with video lectures, or videos with a learning component is the speedup option. That is, an option where one can speedup the play rate of the video (as can be done in, for example, VLC). Of course, having such an option for regular entertainment related videos doesn’t make sense where the pace of the audio and video really dictate the appeal of the entertainment. But it makes a lot of sense for educational videos. Already, for educational videos, as with entertainment videos, one can go back in play time to replay a concept one doesn’t understand the first time. And this can be done arbitrarily many times, arbitrarily at will.

I feel that it would make learning more effective if the speedup option were there too. That is because I believe, a sizable portion of the demographic which is watching the educational videos has already visited the concepts before and would like to rush through the stuff they already know. I know personally that a lot of people like running educational videos 1.5 to 2 times the normal speed. Without the speedup option, one might be forced to download the videos (if such an option exists) limiting the user’s flexibility (say if the user/learner is working on a shared computer).

I am very much hopeful that this single aspect of learning via the internet is going to alleviate the educational challenges we are facing today.

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