

Videos are boring and why Codecademy  Everyone - piratelogic
http://hackingeducation.posterous.com/videos-are-boring-and-codecademy-everyone

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kinleyd
Heh, thanks for the post which I found entertaining, especially this part:
"Videos allow the viewer to sit in a comfy chair and listen to a soft-voiced,
nice-sounding instructor (am I the only one that thinks the voice of Salman
Khan is incredibly soothing?), which inevitably puts the viewer to sleep." :)

More to the topic I personally feel that more important than the choice of
video or interactive exercise as the teaching medium is the individual's
motivation to learn. Without that it's easy to fall asleep, metaphorically
speaking, and with it, things like pausing, rewinding etc. isn't a problem at
all. The training material simply has to open a few conceptual doors, and the
rest naturally follows.

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tangue
Codecademy courses are fairly easy compare to those of Coursera or Udacity.
There's a huge difference between giving someone a badge because he has made
something trivial and trying to teach this person real CS concepts. For those
who really want to learn something Udacity is way better than Codecademy.

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piratelogic
That's a fair argument, but surely there is a way to incorporate Codecademy's
mechanics into sites that cover more advanced material? I suppose that
Udacity's "Programming a Robotic Car" wouldn't have had much luck using this
method, but perhaps an introductory algorithms and data structures course
could.

