Better how-to videos
Educational researchers have long held that presenting students with clear outlines of the material covered in lectures improves their retention. Recent studies indicate that the same is true of online how-to videos, and in a paper being presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing in March, researchers at MIT and Harvard University describe a new system that recruits viewers to create high-level conceptual outlines. Blind reviews by experts in the topics covered by the videos indicated that the outlines produced by the new system were as good as, or better than, those produced by other experts. The outlines also serve as navigation tools, so viewers already familiar with some of a video’s content can skip ahead, while others can backtrack to review content they missed the first time around. “That addresses one of the fundamental problems with videos,” says Juho Kim, an MIT graduate student in...