From recent discussions with students it has become obvious that where previously the first port of call for students trying to understand a method would have been their notes, followed by recommended textbooks, students are turning away from the written word [in statistics / mathematics at least].
Which leads me to think about what type of material is best conveyed through the medium of video rather than as static text.
For a number of years, I have been recording derivations done (generally aimed at final year mathematics undergraduate students). I try to keep these to under 10 minutes in length, but when I review average watch duration, it is under 3 minutes. Having thought about this carefully, I can’t see a way to shorten these videos without loosing important details.
These videos, considering how niche the target audience is, have proven to be surprisingly popular. Looking at when during the year the peak viewing figures are, they nicely correspond to when most students would be first introduced to the material and then again when they would be revising for examinations. An example of one such video is below:
I’ve also begun to start recording screen demonstrations of how to do different statistical analyses in Minitab and SPSS. This includes not only the basic “how to” but also how to then appropriately edit the resulting output for professional looking reports. These are pitched at second year mathematics students and also at students on MSc programmes in Biology style subjects doing Research Methods courses. For clarity, I keep these on a seperate youtube channel; an example which is feedback for a piece of 2nd year coursework is below:
But this leads to a problem: how do I do the same for R? Beyond the very basics of the initial set up, R is very much a command line, and hence text based language. Despite much trial and error, I’m still struggling to make good videos without spending a huge amount of time on each. The problem is that I’m essentially just commenting on code. It is rather unnatural for me to do this of any other way than by text as it would be much faster to read the text based comments than to listen to the same comments being made on a video.
I prefer to create my R scripts during my videos. I don’t like to “pre-script” the videos as my voice becomes flat rather than conveying enthusiasm. My current major issue with this is that the audio track of the videos are full of sounds of me hitting the keyboard. So I will give it one final attempt with a different keyboard, but otherwise I am stumped at how to deliver effective instructional videos for R. The other alternative is to use pre-written R scripts, but I’ve found this to be a less dynamic solution.
To be decided 