Sharing Nicely

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.