Online D course on coursera/udacity/etc?

[Adam Wilson]

On Tue, 19 Mar 2013 12:40:55 -0700, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh at 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
>> <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
>

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/