Philipp 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 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.
I, like Philipp, had assumed they were doing this as a sort of review — having seen the lectures in class, they were refreshing their memory for a test. But Philipp points out this can’t always be the case:
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.
So a question — are we seeing a new sort of behavior? Students skimming lectures on a first viewing, the way they might skim a textbook on the first reading? And, if so, how does that alter our perception of what we are doing with OCW?
More over at Philipp’s blog.
I tend to do this as well. Again a 1.6 to 2.0 speed up is common for me when it is an option. I can take in words faster than most speakers talk. Or I think I can anyway. If a transcript option is available I generally don’t watch the video but just read the transcript. Now I’m in my 50s so not the typical student but I suspect I am typical (if not in age) of the sort of people who want to get education online. Time is an issue. We think we are smart enough to learn at a quick pace and the classroom is often too slow moving for us. An in-person class may be more valuable when there is intereaction between instructor and student but even then if the intereaction is with other students it’s just as easy and faster to watch the video.
The analogy between skimming and speeding up the video might not be correct. I can read and understand well faster than many others - that doesn’t mean I am skimming. But somehow with speech there is no choice of how fast you receive it (which is nice sometimes, because it means I finish watching a Chinese movie in the same time as my girlfriend, compared to spending five-ten times as long on a Chinese book).
Both good points (or kind of the same point).
Skimming is probably a bad analogy. I’ve sped up notes before on the old minitape recorders and at 2x there’s really no strain.
I do feel though that listening in this way is a somewhat different way of listening, if nothing else it’s more emotionally detached from the presentation — there’s less connection with the speaker as speaker.
I think where I was going with the question is a question I’ve been meaning to post on for some time “Are Lectures Content or Interaction?”. In the traditional division of content, interaction, and assessment, lectures are interaction. But in OCW if this behavior is any guide they are treated as content — perhaps even when the professor speaking is your own professor. I find that interesting — and not all that disturbing, either, since lectures were always a lousy form of interaction — better that they be content and have the interaction be interactive…
re: “Are Lectures Content or Interaction?”
short answer: content
long answer: http://djhbrown.googlepages.com/ManyHeads.zip
well, that’s what i think….
re: speedup
i would venture a guess that it is mostly done for the purposes of visual searching, whether during review or initial exploration. either way, it makes videos a more communicative form of serial organisation than a live lecture, depending on the skill of the cameraman/producer
I’m sure their are some students that are reading this and wondering “… how do I speed up the lectures, that would be great.” Maybe this is all common knowledge now but here are some tips in case it’s new to you:
For Flash video like that found on YouTube, there hasn’t been any option for speed up until now. Enounce, this summer, just released the MySpeed Plug-In for Flash which will speed up (or slow down) most flash content as long as the server delivering the video supports fast download. For Real Player there is the Enounce 2xAV Plug-In for RealPlayer (http://www.enounce.com). Both Quicktime and Windows Media Player have this feature built in to the product although it’s not always easy to find. Of course, for streamed content, it always depends on how the content is streamed from the server whether or not the content can be speeded up. Some servers just won’t send the data any faster than what is needed for a short buffer and to play the content at normal speed.
I would also add that many students have actually said they retain more information when watching the lecture for the first time at an increased rate because they stay more focused on the material.