October 15, 2008
Students Watch Lecture Videos in Fast Forward
Some professors report that when their students are reviewing class materials, the students speed up online recordings of lectures and zip through hour-long presentations in as little as 30 minutes. Sure, their professors sound like chipmunks. But the students say they can absorb the information faster than the professors deliver it.
The latest academic to note the trend is Jan Philipp Schmidt, manager of the Free Courseware Project at the University of the Western Cape, in South Africa. “At the University of Taiwan, students watch calculus lectures between 1.6 and 2 times faster than they were recorded,” he wrote on his blog, Sharing Nicely, summing up comments he had heard at the recent Open Education Conference in Utah. Someone from a university in the Netherlands reported that students like to play videos at double speed, he wrote, “and someone from MIT said the same was true for users of MIT OpenCourseWare.”
In an interview with The Chronicle earlier this year, Al Ducharme, assistant dean of distance and distributed learning at the University of Central Florida, said that many students there speed up lecture videos so that they can watch a 50-minute lecture in about 35 minutes. “The information is coming so slowly, but students today can absorb the information much faster,” he said.
Should professors consider speeding up their acts? —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Wednesday October 15, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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No, but their lectures should feature an orchestrated soundtrack, explosions, and the requisite scantily clad student in need of extra tutoring.
— Bono Oct 15, 04:19 PM #
Attention spans drop over the course of 50 minutes or so and this is just a way to fill in gaps that students recognize they missed. This is no different than when I rewrote class notes after a lecture in 1987 at MSU using a hand held tape recorder from Radio Shack set to 2x. I’ve already heard it once, so I recognize most of the content, and human speech has substantial amount of pause built in. Talking faster will only make students have to review lectures more – no one can absorb a fast flow of information be it 35 or 50 minutes or longer.
— patricknyc Oct 15, 05:06 PM #
And I had a college roommate in 1970 who listened to 33 1/3 rpm recordings of Shakespeare’s plays at 45 or even 78 (if he was in a real hurry!).
— Bob Rosenberg Oct 15, 05:09 PM #
Now, after reading this item, seems the time finally to confess: When I was in my second year as an undergraduate, battling through two majors in English literature, reading stacks of books from the two strands – Shakespeare and before; and Shakespeare and after – I became so swamped one week that I checked out a bunch of LPs of Shakespeare plays that had been recorded at 33-1/3 rpm, and listened to them at 45rpm. It didn’t help a whole lot. I’d have needed a player capable of running at 78rpm, while I simultaneously read The Faerie Queen, medieval mystery plays, all the poetry of John Donne, and Paradise Lost. And my little record player could broadcast only one disc at a time.
— pm Oct 15, 05:23 PM #
I think it’s great. Will someone show me the option to play at double speed?
— How can I do that? Oct 15, 05:27 PM #
“…students today can absorb the information much faster”. Huh??? Is this supported by any experimental data? Do students who listen to a 50-minute lecture in 30 minutes have the same level of understanding of the material as their slower peers? Has someone verified this?
I’m thinking Father Guido Sarducci’s 5-minute University may be closer than we thought. We can speed up all of our classes and get two or three semesters out of the way in just one semester; saving the student loads of time (and money).
“Should professors consider speeding up their acts?” I, for one, would welcome the opportunity to finish a 50-minute class in 20 or 30 minutes so I can go do something I like. Maybe I can talk the registrar into only sending me the students who have promised to keep up with my high speed lecture mode.
I sense a revolution coming in higher education and I surely want to be on the forefront!
— George Oct 15, 05:36 PM #
But how does this compare to reading speed? My students dislike reading as much as anyone, but they can read much more quickly than I can speak. Where’s the problem?
— Pete Oct 15, 05:46 PM #
Maybe the question is whether watching a lecture at twice the speed is a valuable method of learning. Perhaps we need to move past listening to lectures as a concept of learning information. If we were doing more interactive and dynamic learning in the classroom, students wouldn’t need to speed up a recording of their class.
— Amy Pate Oct 15, 07:42 PM #
Oh, maybe the profs should just hand out the Soma and be done with it.
— rb Oct 15, 08:23 PM #
I agree with George: Where’s the evidence that students today can absorb information much faster? (Did Ducharme mean that they can absorb information faster than students in earlier times, or that they can absorb it faster than the information is presented in a lecture, or something else?) My experience with most students who speed-read or speed-listen is that they usually absorb relatively little information, and that they retain and understand even less.
— B Petrulis Oct 16, 06:56 AM #
it is not that the students today can actually absorb the information faster, it is that they are impatient. They grew up in a society that promotes ‘multitasking’ and features fast motion switches between various forms of data (witness music videos), so students naturally think that they can obtain enough information to pass the test, and then get on to more pleasant things. remember, these students have been sold a bill of goods that everyone deserves a college degree, and that it is required in order to meet the risen expectations of the first generation of ‘the entitled’.
I seem to recall that a lot of my students used to see me after class or during my office hours (and even when I was eating lunch) to clarify details from my lectures: they focus on facts rather than on deeper comprehension.
— Frank Page Oct 16, 08:07 AM #
Why then do students complain that faculty go through their lectures too quickly using PowerPoint slides and say they would prefer faculty rely more on the board?
— Linda Nilson Oct 16, 08:09 AM #
Ah, ye of little faith.
This made a huge difference for me when I was in college. I recorded all of my lectures, and then I used a time-compression plugin to speed them up as much as possible for review. Some professors I could easily speed up by 50%, and others only around 25%, but the fact of the matter is that this was very helpful for me in hammering tons of information into my brain. I regularly took 20+ credits and was able to graduate with honors. It was not a situation where I didn’t pay attention in class and then listened to what I had missed later. I merely was reinforcing what I had already heard and sometimes going over difficult things multiple times.
The bottom line is that if this works for other students like it did for me, then the luddites out there should mind their own business…
— Tim O'Brien Oct 16, 08:53 AM #
Please see research from late 1960s-early 1970s dealing with combinations of audio and visual learning at increased speed of viewing and or listening. Short term retention was facilitated. Research done by military in Montgomery AL and was well known among AL colleges/universities. Did not work as well for introduction of data, but even new information gained at high speeds facilitated short term retention. Do not recall measurements of long term retention.
— Jonathan Lindsey Oct 16, 09:33 AM #
I and others have done empirical research in variable speed playback (VSP) and time-compressed audio. There is very clear evidence that some amount of acceleration helps learners stay focused, attentive and avoid a wandering mind when listening to recorded lectures. Furthermore, there are clear benefits to listening to a lecture twice at 2x speed rather than only once at regular speed. The lecturer’s diction and cadence play a role in how much a lecture can be accelerated. A sweet spot seems to be around 1.8 times the speed. It takes some ear training, but most learners can comfortably start out at 1.3x and acclimate to 1.8x by the end of one or two lectures, and after a full semester of this, many students we’re comfortable listening (and learning!) at 2.2x. Elderly learners and not native language speakers are disadvantaged by acceleration, but can sometimes benefit from deceleration. I advocate *variable” rather than fixed speed, allowing a learner to adjust on-the-fly for topic complexity, learner distraction and speaker clarity.
A light NYT read on this is available here: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A07E3D6163CF931A35753C1A9659C8B63
— Joel Galbraith Oct 16, 09:39 AM #
Blind readers of audiobooks have traditionally listened to them at fast-forward; I thiink the usual formula says that people can listen at 6x of speaking speed. This is why the blind-booktapes are recorded in monotonous tones, so that they work well when accelerated. At least, this was true when taped audiobooks were the common means for blind people to read—Wikipedia reports the Books for the Blind program is going digital, as was to be expected, and presumably there will be differences.
— James Mc. Oct 16, 09:55 AM #
Just the fact that students have recorded lectures available to them as part of their learning experience is a huge gain in education because they do have a fixed reusable means of getting the information and getting TO the information, and they can do it in ways that they have control over. If they don’t understand, they can go back over that section as many times as they need to, on their own, in their own learning space and time, without having to rely on office hours or the availability of the instructor. This is called learner-centered instruction. Let the learners get at their learning they way they need to. It also meets the needs of those students who have different learning preferences.
The only suggestion I would make to instructors is to really consider how and what they are recording. Attention spans last about 14 minutes, so if you have 2 hours of lecture that you feel you MUST deliver, chunk it by topic and sub-topic in short segments and don’t rely on these recorded lectures as being the be-all, end-all of your teaching. It’s only a small part of it.
And truly, in the end, regardless of whether or not they are listening to the recordings at higher speeds or multiple times, or not at all…the proof is in what they learn and what they are able to do with it. Isn’t this the end goal all instruction should have?
— E. Brown Oct 16, 12:10 PM #
I remember watching a blind professor using his screen reader. To me it sounded like the chirping of a parakeet on speed and I couldn’t understand a word. He, being used to it, could, and it was perfectly clear to him. He’d learned to process sound at speed :-)
— Mauri Collins Oct 16, 12:17 PM #
To me this all suggests that we should just do away with lecturing “live” altogether. Record your semester’s lectures in someplace like Hawaii and just post them on a website. Let the students listen to them at whatever time and speed they wish, while you are free to do something else.
Of course this tact will hasten the end of the university as we know it, but there are some of our number who think this would be a good idea.
— Socrates Oct 16, 12:22 PM #
The two basic accounting courses at Brigham Young University are nearly all taught using a highly successful variable speed video lectures.
You can read the following at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
Learning Basic Financial Accounting at Brigham Young University (BYU) From Homegrown Videos
Developer and Instructor: Norman Nemrow [nemrow@byu.edu]
Title of Package of Eight CDs: Introduction to Accounting: The Language of Business
Textbook: I think this package can be used along with virtually any basic accounting textbook
Pedagogy: Students learn from video lesson modules before each class. The video lessons display
the course instructor in video as well as accompanying PowerPoint displays that are auto-
matically sequenced with the video. Students have nifty options to both replay the previous
five minutes and to play the videos a double (2x) speed that is an outstanding option
for reviewing previously-learned material.
Classes: Classes are more inspirational than perspirational (e.g., frequent use of visiting speakers)
Outcomes: Purportedly students perform better vis-à-vis previous lecture pedagogy without video.
See the following evaluation of learning:
“Variable Speed Playback of Digitally Recorded Lectures: Evaluating Learner Feedback,” by Joel D. Galbraith
(joel_galbraith@byu.edu ) and Steven G. Spencer —- http://www.enounce.com/docs/BYUPaper020319.pdf
Basic accounting students At BYU have great success learning accounting from special videos —- http://www.accountingcds.com/index.html
Contact Information:
Cameron Earl 801-836-5649 cameronearl@byu.edu
Norm Nemrow 801-422-3029 nemrow@byu.edu
Update message on November 3, 2005
Bob has posted our new website in an earlier post, but the new URL to our new website describing our accounting tools is www.accountingcds.com
We have a demo of VSP (the technology that speeds up the video and audio) technology here: http://www.accountingcds.com/learn/links/vspdemo.htm
Cameron Earl
BYU
Also see David Cottrell’s approach at BYU —- http://www.business.uconn.edu/users/adunbar/AAA-CPE/AAA2003Cottrell.pdf
Master Educators Who Deliver Exceptional Courses or Entire Programs
But Have Little Contact With Individual Students
Before reading this section, you should be familiar with the document at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#Teaching
Master educators can also be outstanding researchers, although research is certainly not a requisite to being a master educator. Many master educators are administrators of exceptional accounting education programs. They’re administrative duties typically leave little time for research, although they may write about education and learning. Some master educators are not even tenure track faculty.
What I’ve noticed in recent years is how technology can make a huge difference. Nearly every college these days has some courses in selected disciplines because they are utilizing some type exciting technology. Today I returned from a trip to Jackson, Mississippi where I conduced a day-long CPE session on education technology for accounting educators in Mississippi (what great southern hospitality by the way). So the audience would not have to listen to me the entire day, I invited Cameron Earl from Brigham Young University to make a presentation that ran for about 90 minutes. I learned some things about top educators at BYU, which by the way is one of the most respected universities in the world. If you factor out a required religion course on the Book of Mormon, the most popular courses on the BYU campus are the two basic accounting courses. By popular I mean in terms of thousands of students who elect to take these courses even if they have no intention of majoring in business or economics where these two courses are required. Nearly all humanities and science students on campus try to sign up for these two accounting courses.
After students take these two courses, capacity constraints restrict the numbers of successful students in these courses who are then allowed to become accounting majors at BYU. I mean I’m talking about a very, very small percentage who are allowed to become accounting students. Students admitted to the accounting program generally have over 3.7 minimum campus-wide grade averages.
This begs the question of what makes the two basic accounting courses so exceptionally popular in such a large and prestigious university?
These two basic accounting courses are not sought out for easy grades. In fact they are among the hardest courses for high grades at BYU. I think that this is probably true in most business schools in the nation.
These two BYU courses are not sought out for face-to-face contact with the instructor. The courses have thousands of students each term such that most students do not see the instructor outside of class even though he’s available over ten hours per week for those who seek him out. Each course only meets in live classes eight times per semester. Most of the speakers in those eight classes are outstanding visiting speakers who add a great deal to the popularity of the course. This is often one difference between a course run by a master educator versus a master teacher. A master educator often brings in top talent to inspire and educate students.
The courses undoubtedly benefit from the the shortage of accounting graduates in colleges nationwide and the exceptional career opportunities for students who want careers in accounting, taxation, law, business management, government, criminal justice, and other organizations. But these accountancy advantages exist for every college that has an accounting education program. Most all colleges do not have two basic accounting courses that are sought out by every student in the entire university. That makes BYU’s two basic accounting courses truly exceptional.
Some courses in every college are popular these days because they are doing something exceptional with technology. These two BYU courses increased in popularity when a self-made young man became a multimillionaire and decided to devote his life to being a master educator in these two accountancy courses at BYU. His name is Norman Nemrow. He runs these courses full time without salary at BYU and is neither a tenure track faculty member or a noted researcher at BYU. I think he qualifies, however, as an education researcher even if he does not publish his findings in academic journals. The video disks are available to anyone in the world for a relatively small fee that goes to BYU, but BYU is not doing this for purposes of making great profits. You can read more about how to get the course disks at the following links:
Basic accounting students At BYU have great success learning accounting from special videos —- http://www.accountingcds.com/index.html
Contact Information: Cameron Earl 801-836-5649 cameronearl@byu.edu
Norm Nemrow 801-422-3029 nemrow@byu.edu
Also see David Cottrell’s approach at BYU —- http://www.business.uconn.edu/users/adunbar/AAA-CPE/AAA2003Cottrell.pdf
The students in these two courses learn the technical aspects of from variable-speed video disks that were produced by Norman and a team of video and learning experts. Cameron Earl is a recent graduate of BYU who is part of the technical team that delivers these two courses on video. Formal studies of Nemrow’s video courses indicate that students generally prefer to learn from the video relative to live lectures. The course has computer labs run by teaching assistants who can give live tutorials to individual students, but most students who have the video disks for their own computers do not seek out the labs.
Trivia Question
At BYU most students on campus elect to take Norman Nemrow’s two basic accounting courses. In the distant past, what exceptional accounting professor managed to get his basic accounting courses required at a renowned university while he was teaching these courses?
Trivia Answer
Bill Paton is one of the all-time great accounting professors in history. His home campus was the University of Michigan, and for a period of time virtually all students at his university had to take basic accounting (or at least so I was told by several of Paton’s former doctoral students). Bill Paton was one of the first to be inducted into the Accounting Hall of Fame.
As an aside, I might mention that I favor requiring two basic accounting courses for every student admitted to a college or university, including colleges who do not even have business education programs.
But the “required accounting courses” would not, in my viewpoint, be a traditional basic accounting courses. About two thirds or more of these courses should be devoted to personal finance, investing, business law, tax planning. The remainder of the courses should touch on accounting basics for keeping score of business firms and budgeting for every organization in society.
At the moment, the majority of college graduates do not have a clue about the time value of money and the basics of finance and accounting that they will face the rest of their lives.
There are other ways of being “mastery educators” without being master teachers in a traditional sense. Three professors of accounting at the University of Virginia developed and taught a year-long intermediate accounting case where students virtually had to teach themselves in a manner that they found painful and frustrating. But there are metacognitive reasons where the end result made this year-long active learning task one of the most meaningful and memorable experiences in their entire education —- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
They often painfully grumbled with such comments as “everything I’m learned in this course I’m having to learn by myself.”
You can read about mastery learning and all its frustrations at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#Teaching
— Robert E. Jensen Oct 16, 01:59 PM #
Great! Record all lectures, distribute them electronically to students who will speed them up, and they can finish a 4 year degree in just over 2 years!
Or is education something more than an information dump?
— Gene Oct 16, 02:43 PM #
“I, for one, would welcome the opportunity to finish a 50-minute class in 20 or 30 minutes so I can go do something I like…. Gee George, maybe you should get out of teaching if you don’t enjoy it….life’s too short, do something you enjoy!
— BJ Oct 16, 02:59 PM #
At Northwestern, we use Sonic Foundry’s Mediasite, which does allow students to select the speed at which they prefer to view a lecture. To a person, they all agree that having the ability to adjust the speed is greatly helpful for them. My students don’t tend to use the variable speed functions on the first run-through. However, when reviewing, many choose to speed the presentation up slightly to watch and listen while they check over their notes for the given lecture.
It’s very funny to say that you can cut the time it takes to achieve a degree in half by using variable speed presentation software, but the reality is that we’re providing our students with options that help them address their own needs. Students with learning disabilities may prefer to slow down or speed up lectures so that they can address any special needs they have. The time it takes to study is going to vary from person to person regardless of the tools you give them. But when you’re able to offer more functions and more options to them, they can have a lot more control over their own success.
— Jodi Fox Oct 16, 05:34 PM #
I teach the blind, and as I prepare websites I often listen to them using the screen reader JAWS. The speed at which I have JAWS read to me is nearly 2 times the speed of speech, and many of my colleagues wonder how I understand what is being said. For me it is just a matter of getting use to the speed of this speech. Most of my colleagues are amazed when I tell them, that most of the blind students I deal with actually set JAWS to read much faster than I do. When I read this article, my first thought was that these students are not much different from my blind students, they have trained themselves to listen to this faster speech. It doesn’t mean they care any less, or absorb any less, they are just different. This should not threaten us, we should embrace this concept, first through testing and then utilize it to improve our instruction.
— Cal Stanley Oct 16, 11:45 PM #
In 1985, I took a distance ed course on music appreciation. The lectures were on cassette, so I borrowed a variable speed tape player from a blind friend (nod to Cal Stanley #24) and listened to Professor Chipmunk explain the difference between the clarinet and the flute. I slowed it down again for the musical examples. Aced the class and went on to a long and happy life listening appreciatively to classical music.
— Shar Oct 17, 02:30 AM #
For those in need of a laugh – Father Guido’s commentary on Youtube. Enjoy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO8×8eoU3L4
— butterflywoman Oct 17, 11:02 AM #
We use Mediasite to teach dental and dental hygiene students. In a survey we conducted amonng our students, 91% indicated that lecture capture helped them learn. This student seemed to sum of the feeling of the majority. “It makes it possible to learn all the material that is presented and takes a lot of the stress out of trying to take notes in class. The ability to PAUSE and write down things at your own pace. Many times teachers speak so quickly and you don’t want to keep asking them to repeat or slow down. With Mediasite you are able to learn the first time around as opposed to being in class where you have to struggle to take notes (keep up) so you can’t always focus on grasping the material. When you try to absorb one thing in the brain, the teacher is already moving on to the next topic. This is a very helpful tool for review also. It allows us to be more flexible and even multitask.” One of the items most preferred by our students using lecture capture was the speed control. This is particularly important with students where English is a second language.
— James Craig Oct 17, 12:23 PM #
It’s not that students are absorbing information faster. The point of reviewing lectuers is just that.. to REVIEW them. If one were to listen to a lecture for the first time at 2x the speed (or 1.6x the speed), it would STILL need to be reviewed. Humans can’t remember 100% of what they hear, so this is just a way to do that, by listening to something more than once. And since you already listened to it the first time, you can listen to it faster the second time and catch what you missed.
— Student Oct 17, 02:00 PM #
This article doesn’t mention which products students are using to speed up the content. We should give those who don’t know how to speed up lectures some tips on which products can do this. Please add to this list if I’ve left anything out or correct me if I’ve miss-stated any information about these products.
For Real Player there is the Enounce 2xAV Plug-In for RealPlayer (http://www.enounce.com). For Flash video like that found on YouTube, there hasn’t been any option for speed up until now. Enounce, this summer, just released the MySpeed Plug-In for Flash (<a href=“http://www.myspeed.us”>www.myspeed.us</a>) which will speed up (or slow down) most flash content as long as the server delivering the video supports fast download. If you see the download progress speed ahead of the current playback position (like YouTube) until the whole file has been downloaded, then MySpeed will work with that content. For example the Echo360 lecture capture and delivery system works great wtih MySpeed in the audio only mode that they call “Low Speed Audio” (meaning low internet speed, not low playback speed). With “High Speed” (high bandwidth) option the server only streams the video out fast enough to play at normal speed. Both Quicktime and Windows Media Player have this feature built in to the product although it’s not always easy to find and again it always depends on teh how the content is streamed from the server whether or not the content can be speeded up.
— Enounce Oct 27, 03:36 PM #