On Tue, 19 Mar 2013 12:40:55 -0700, H. S. Teoh <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx>
wrote:
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
Agreed. I was using Documentation in a broader than usual sense here, but
that is the general idea that I was trying to get across. We need to work
on the written stuff before we considering videos as that's where the
payoff is.
--
Adam Wilson
IRC: LightBender
Project Coordinator
The Horizon Project
http://www.thehorizonproject.org/
