Day 7: Mini-screencasts
Yesterday Jason and Greg experimented with breaking apart a 10 minute screencast on database grouping and aggregation into even more bite-sized pieces. We have two flavours today: point form notes with links to the screencasts, or point form notes with screencasts embedded. [Links no longer active, latest screencast on database aggregation as of January 2012.]
Feedback on this format would be really helpful. Are these chunks too small? Do you prefer embedding over linking, or vice versa? Also, we’d welcome any comments on the material itself, of course.
I like the point form notes with links to the screencasts; more skimmable, can go to just the videos you want, and can more easily see the context of the particular screencast.
One thing with the screencast pages — do you think it would be better if the bullet points are above, rather than below, the video?
Thanks Jonathan. Yeah, I wondered about where to place the screencast in relation to the notes as well. If the blurb of notes for a screencast is long, then either way they are probably going to bleed off the screen when a student is watching the screencast. I’m not sure if there is a best option here…
I think the way you’re doing them, the blurb of notes won’t be too long very often; you’re really just covering one concept at a go.
Incidentally, I really like the size of the units you’re using. I don’t know for sure what students taking the course the first time, who are probably used to longer units of instriction, will think of it — that you’ll just have to see. My guess is they’ll adjust quickly and like it. But if you make the units this small, stringing several together in a playlist (maybe with transition slides between them) is easy, so those who wanted to could watch a whole bunch at a time, and those who don’t can see them one concept at a time.
I really liked this setup in general. Having to watch seven separate videos to see the information for the first time was a bit inconvenient, but not a huge deal, and being able to go back and easily re-watch just one section was well worth the initial inconvenience.
One possible improvement, building on Jonathan’s suggestions, would be to have one embedded video at the top, which contains all of the smaller segments spliced together with transition slides, followed by the point form notes with links to the separated sections. This would fit my standard use case where I want to get an overview of the material and then be able to go back and easily look up specific details that I missed.
Thanks Jonathan, Ethan.
Okay, what about if we had a way to do deep linking into the videos, much like YouTube allows (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwER63QkRkA#t=1m48s). Then, we could have notes, and links from those notes (say, in the headings) that jump to the right section of the screencast. I like this idea because then users could scrub backwards or forwards if they need more or less context.
I’m not sure of how feasible deep linking is for use to do — haven’t looked into it at all — but do you think it satisfies both of your concerns?
That would be perfect from my perspective. It provides the best of both worlds from a viewing perspective, reduces the amount of stuff on the main page, and keeps everything in the same location so that you don’t have to link off to other pages to watch each video.