On Mon, 18 Mar 2013 18:52:42 -0700, Andrei Alexandrescu
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hello,
Online courses are becoming quite popular. A D course on one of the
up-and-coming online course sites would be great. If anyone would want
to do such a course (e.g. derived from TDPL), chime in here with ideas.
Thanks,
Andrei
We looked into doing something like this for one of our products. And got
a few interesting takeaways from it.
First off, doing anything of the quality that a site like Coursera is
likely to accept requires a pretty substantial up-front investment. You
need access to a soundstage, HD camera, audio mixing gear, and an
assortment of lights for the "talking head" portions of the videos that
are usually present. Even if you choose to eschew the talking head
portions completely you still need access to a sound-isolated booth and
audio mixing gear. This wasn't a major problem for us (you can rent these
things just about anywhere in North America/Europe), so it wasn't the
reason we decided not to.
I'd also point out that this really requires a trained voice-actor with
knowledge of how to modulate their voice to sound correct in audio.
Voice-Over work is most definitely NOT something just anyone can do.
Unless the community has someone with the needed skills in this area,
you'd be well advised to hire it out for a few K$. Having a good voice
will make ALL the difference in whether or not people can even stand to
listen through a single video segment. We (Prospective Software) happen to
have someone with the required skills on staff already, so that wasn't the
reason we decided against either.
The reason we decided not to essentially boils down to the inherent
properties of video. First, video is linear. And second, video is not
searchable. Given that programming is both highly non-linear and highly
context-sensitive, these two properties make video a less than ideal
method for teaching languages. That's not to say it can't be done, our
marketing guy took the C# course from Lynda.com (similar to coursera) in
order to better understand what he is selling (and just what the heck
those programmers were saying!). However, the content was very basic, and
was not really meant as anything other than a jumping off point for
experimentation. And even to cover the basics took something like 40hrs of
video. It took the marketing guy 40 hours to complete roughly 8 hours of
video due to the constant rewinding and reloading of other videos he
needed to remind himself. Now the marketing guy has no programming
background, but that said, languages are contextual, and you always have
to rewind to remember what the the presenter is referencing from two
videos ago.
There was also another reason. We couldn't find a single company in our
space (broadly defined as programmer tools) that used videos as their
primary teaching method. If they had any videos at all, they tended to be
feature-specific usage demonstrations. What were the companies we looked
at pushing as the best way to learn their software? Documentation. Which I
define as searchable documents that encourage hands-on experimentation.
Also of note is that their documentation tends to be well organized,
easily searchable, includes high amounts of detail, and most importantly,
is well written.
Given the costs associated with video production, and the inherent
difficulties of teaching programming via video. I would say that D would
get a MUCH better ROI on improving the available documentation. Consider
for a moment that video can only answer the questions that the scripter
forsees, how then is the new users supposed to continue learning beyond
what the videos teach?
There is yet another factor to be considered. Producing video is a very
laborious process. And once it is produced, it cannot be changed without
being re-shot and reedited. Given the high rate-of-change that D has been
experiencing, the chances of the video become obsolete quickly are very
high, even when constrained to the basics. Essentially, every bug fix
becomes another potential video re-shot. This was another factor we faced
since we are planning for (roughly) quarterly feature releases.
My personal opinion is that D is nowhere near ready for videos. The
documentation itself is very thin and what there is tends to be either
out-of-date, poorly-written, light on details, or some combination
thereof. Without searchable docs to back-up what it shown in the videos,
there is a good chance that you'll just confuse people.
However, I am sure that their are counter arguments, and I am not
intending to disuade, only comment on our experiences. We have another
product in development for a completely different market (Aftermarket
Automotive CRM) that we intend on developing over 100 hours of video
training for, because it happens to work well in that market.
--
Adam Wilson
IRC: LightBender
Project Coordinator
The Horizon Project
http://www.thehorizonproject.org/
