On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 12:15:02PM -0700, Adam Wilson wrote: > On Mon, 18 Mar 2013 18:52:42 -0700, Andrei Alexandrescu > <seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org> wrote: [...] > >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. [...] > 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 agree that doing a full-scale online video course for D is probably not a good idea at the moment. However, that does not preclude having a text-based course, which is much easier to produce and keep up-to-date. Although video is nice to have, I don't see it as essential. In fact, I tend to avoid video courses, because (1) it takes a lot of time to watch the videos (reading is much more efficient); (2) it's difficult to go through a video piecemeal (you lose the train of thought of the speaker), whereas you can pause while reading whenever you like and resume later; (3) reading permits highly-nonlinear consumption of materials: you can put the current page on hold, click on a link to more details about something you didn't quite understand, read that first, then come back, etc.. (4) Written material is searchable. I contend that a text-based course is *not* the same as documentation. Documentation is intended for reference: to look up something when you already know what you're looking for. A *course*, OTOH, is for learning: you need some guidance to grasp the basic principles and concepts before the documentation is useful to you. Sorta like a tutorial, but more thorough, and with interspersed activities like quizzes, small programming projects, etc.. Depending on how you structure it, you can do a lot without needing to shoot/maintain videos. T -- Life is unfair. Ask too much from it, and it may decide you don't deserve what you have now either.