Online D course on coursera/udacity/etc?

H. S. Teoh hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx
Tue Mar 19 12:40:55 PDT 2013


On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 12:15:02PM -0700, Adam Wilson wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Mar 2013 18:52:42 -0700, Andrei Alexandrescu
> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at 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.


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