Saturday, January 19, 2013

Online Education: Videos or Screencasts?

Pluralsight just received $27.5M Series A Funding

It will be interesting to see how the online education trend evolves,
both from free-University side (Udacity, Coursera, edX etc...)
and from commercial books/training side (O'Reilly Safari Books Online, Pluralsight , Linda, etc...)
or even public education (Khan Academy etc...)
or recorded events (Ted, InfoQ, etc...)

Most of those "edu videos" sites have already received some investment...

While video is currently preferred delivery medium,
that is in my opinion a less than optimal choice.

For most classes "enhanced screen-cast" would be better, I think.
Actual screens and content delivered by HTML5 (or Mobile/Flash/Silverlight) apps
rather than or in addition to "plain" videos.
Screens could be "bound" to related content: slides, code, annotations, notes, comments, ratings, etc.

For example, many edu videos for developers are already screencasts,
but not linked to code samples or related data, web pages, other videos, etc...

Ted.com has so far the best example of what can be done, and InfoQ is nice too.
On Ted there is a synchronized text, including transaltion in many languages,
and click on text leads to matching section of video.

A year ago I have experimented little bit with AI-class and Udacity Robotics,
but as YouTube API changes, that stops working..

Free: Video: Drill Into Semantic Zoom in Windows 8 with XAML and C# | the pluralsight blog



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