Education builds largely on high-quality education videos, produced by similar methods as big-budget movies
I think a key challenge in this particular case is that children (and adults to a lesser degree) respond differently to someone who’s physically present—they’re more engaged, they’re following the teacher’s social cues more closely, etc. And the teacher is able to also rapidly pick up cues from children—noticing if a kid is staring blankly, or when another kid looks really excited by what the teacher’s just said. All those aspects would be missing if kids are just watching videos.
I haven’t looked at the research here; these things just seem pretty straightforwardly clear to me. I’m prepared to believe I’m wrong on some or all of it if someone has dug more deeply.
I’ve not dug deep in the research literature either. A quick google search gave me this 2021 meta-analysis: Video Improves Learning in Higher Education: A Systematic Review. From the abstract: “Swapping video for existing teaching methods led to small improvements in student learning (g = 0.28). Adding video to existing teaching led to strong learning benefits (g = 0.80).”
(Huh, that’s better than I expected, apparently videos are already now very useful.)
When thinking of the arguments on “people respond differently to videos”, videos also have some points in favor of them: Videos can actually be quite captivating (there’s undeniably a lot of variance in both teachers and videos), you can insert visual cues to guide attention, it’s easier to iterate to alleviate these issues, …
Stronger effect size than I would have expected also! But unsurprising that the effect size would be much larger when video is added to existing teaching; it seems like that could give you the best of both.
But yeah, absent further info or a closer look at the literature, your argument seems more plausible to me than it did before your comment. Thanks!
I think a key challenge in this particular case is that children (and adults to a lesser degree) respond differently to someone who’s physically present—they’re more engaged, they’re following the teacher’s social cues more closely, etc. And the teacher is able to also rapidly pick up cues from children—noticing if a kid is staring blankly, or when another kid looks really excited by what the teacher’s just said. All those aspects would be missing if kids are just watching videos.
I haven’t looked at the research here; these things just seem pretty straightforwardly clear to me. I’m prepared to believe I’m wrong on some or all of it if someone has dug more deeply.
I’ve not dug deep in the research literature either. A quick google search gave me this 2021 meta-analysis: Video Improves Learning in Higher Education: A Systematic Review. From the abstract: “Swapping video for existing teaching methods led to small improvements in student learning (g = 0.28). Adding video to existing teaching led to strong learning benefits (g = 0.80).”
(Huh, that’s better than I expected, apparently videos are already now very useful.)
When thinking of the arguments on “people respond differently to videos”, videos also have some points in favor of them: Videos can actually be quite captivating (there’s undeniably a lot of variance in both teachers and videos), you can insert visual cues to guide attention, it’s easier to iterate to alleviate these issues, …
Stronger effect size than I would have expected also! But unsurprising that the effect size would be much larger when video is added to existing teaching; it seems like that could give you the best of both.
But yeah, absent further info or a closer look at the literature, your argument seems more plausible to me than it did before your comment. Thanks!