Why I don’t prefer video lessons for effective learning.

Humans have been learning since their existence. They also loved to pass on their learning to future generation or cohabitants; the reason why we see writings on caves and the manuscripts. These were the natural way of transferring knowledge on those days. Since then our knowledge has been compounding.

Along with us, grew technology. We devised new learning techniques-techniques which has long lasting impacts; which helps painless understanding of concepts. Learning through articles, text books, pictures and videos was becoming popular. With the advent of high speed internet transfer of ones learning became much easier.

Video lessons are one of the most popular learning techniques these days. High quality video lessons can easily be consumed and understood. Many video tutorial websites began sprouting. Pluralsight, udemy, egghead.io are some of the popular ones. Professional networking platform linkedin also had their video learning division called linkedin learning. People started migrating towards video lessons for ‘effective’ learning. They love it. Its easy to understand; its comprehensive and explains things very well with examples. Oh boy..its like a real classroom! The jovial funny expert teacher explains things very well… We can take out learning tool and start following him and learn it very well.

You might be wondering .. yeah these are true.. but this article title says the opposite. Whats happening?

Learning through video lessons have a lot of advantages, for example: If you want to learn a guitar lesson, video lessons are far more useful rather than reading a pdf lesson telling about the same. But I think its not universally the same.

Through this article, I am just making you see through a different angle. (Of course this obviously varies with what you are trying to learn. Here I am assuming an example of learning a new technology or topic.)

• A video lesson actually is telling you things. It feels like somebody is trying to teach you.
• A textual lesson on the other hand gives a feeling that you are going towards it and trying to grasp it.
• I feel the latter is more closer to us and hence is more effective for the same reason.

Mostly, watching a video lesson feels like this. It feels like lacking an effort from your side.

• Besides that textual lessons let you go through the snippet and let your brain register it thoroughly, while its not the same with video lessons.

So, what I believe is that we must design our own learning techniques, take bits and pieces from everywhere, apply it in our life and make it effective.