Tuesday, October 7th, 2008...7:12 am
High-Speed Video Lectures
One factoid from the Open Ed conference in Utah that has been banging around the inside of my head is this: Apparently students that access video lectures online like to speed them up. At the University of Taiwan, students watch calculus lectures between 1.6 and 2 times faster than they were recorded. Willem from the TU Delft reported that one of their students’ most used features was the ability to play the videos at double speed. And someone from MIT said the same was true for users of MIT OpenCourseWare.
For some of these speed freaks, the videos are clearly repetition of materials that they have already learned, and they are just skimming through them in preparation for an exam. But many of the users in Taiwan did not even show up for the exam (the courses were not mandatory). Also, in Taiwan it turned out that all of the users who liked to go faster, lived in the same dorm - nobody who lived outside of the dorm had come up with the idea.
I would be interested to find out how self-learners that have no interest in assessment work with these videos - do they also find them too slow? And how do students feel about their professors (too slow)? Thanks to Telkom’s bandwidth policies, I rarely download lecture videos, but I do listen to quite a lot of podcasts. And different from these OCW users, I usually find myself pausing and skipping back to listen to certain passages a second time, rather than wanting to go faster.
7 Comments
October 7th, 2008 at 11:08 am
[...] Schmidt discusses one of the takeaways from Logan that I found interesting as well — students love to watch video at increased speed when offered the option, e.g. watch an hour lecture in 45 minutes by playing it at 150% speed: One [...]
October 7th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
This makes perfect sense to me. Voice is a very low-bandwidth medium, and I often find listening to long presentations quite tedious. _Especially_ if I probably know part of the material already (like listening to conference proceedings on topics I am familiar with). Here, scanning a text and then slowing down when I hit something interesting would be far more efficient. I haven’t actually tried speeding up a video, but I could see it working quite well - especially if you had a nice interface, and were able to easily slow it down to normal speed, or even slower, to capture details (I often pause it to read off slides for example).
Sadly, this is almost impossible with all the streaming video out there.
October 8th, 2008 at 12:55 am
My problem with high-speed audio is that there is very little structure to hold on to and especially if speakers make long(ish) arguments, it’s easy to get lost if you don’t listen to the whole train of thought in one go. What would be great is an outline of the audio with short abstracts of the different sections, like a table of content, that let’s you skip to the part you are interested in, or back to the part you missed.
I hope any open source software developers are reading this (very slowly, not just skimming!) and feel inspired to work on something like this.
October 16th, 2008 at 6:01 am
[...] Board Member Philipp Schmidt appears in yesterday’s Wired Campus column, regarding his double-speed lecture observation: The latest academic to note the trend is Jan Philipp Schmidt, manager of the Free Courseware [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 9:58 am
[...] calculus lectures between 1.6 and 2 times faster than they were recorded,” he wrote on his blog, Sharing Nicely, summing up comments he had heard at the recent Open Education Conference in Utah. Someone from a [...]
October 21st, 2008 at 7:32 am
[...] calculus lectures between 1.6 and 2 times faster than they were recorded,” he wrote on his blog, Sharing Nicely, summing up comments he had heard at the recent Open Education Conference in Utah. Someone from a [...]
March 19th, 2009 at 9:32 am
At my university lectures are recorded. I like watching them at 1.5 or 2x speed because you can go through material faster (when cramming) or for reviewing familiar material (like a lazy-man’s version of skim-reading notes).
I find it also keeps you awake because its harder to keep up with someone talking about transmembrane proteins at twice the speed, and my theory is that it speeds up your brain, because when you go back to normal speed it feels like the lecturer is speaking in slow motion.
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