Wednesday, December 4, 2013

LN 05 - Personalized Learning Video Speed Matters! Tom Kuhlmann Responds Quickly!

"Learning speed matters for watching videos, too! The Rewind and Forward buttons are not enough!"
 - Zaid Ali Alsagoff


LEARNING SPEED

Do you read fast? Say, 400 words per minute. Or perhaps you read more than a 1000 words per minute! Or perhaps your reading speed is really slow (250 words or less)? Can you imagine if you were forced to read at a specific pace to learn, wouldn't that be terrible? 

What about when watching learning videos, doesn't the same apply here? It is great that we can rewind and forward learning videos, but wouldn't it be cool if we had tools to control the pace of the talking professor (or whatever we are listening or watching). Some Professors speak so slowly that they put us to sleep even before they start. Some MIT and Harvard Professors speaks so fast only aliens and 'IQ' geniuses can understand. And that is when perhaps we need to slow down the pace to decipher their super complex algorithms explained at the word of light (Well, we still might not understand, but at least we can capture the words said).   

Alright, auto-translated audio to text (in multiple languages) is fine, but I like to listen also the passionate voice of the Professor, too (even if he or she might sound like Mickey Mouse when paced faster).

COURSERA GETS IT!



Have you ever taken a Coursera course? If you have, you might have noticed that you can decrease (.75x) or increase up to two times the speed (2x) of the learning videos, so that you can pace it to your liking. Personally, I would like it to be even more flexible, so that we can increase the speed further to even three times or more. For example, blind people can usually listen extremely fast to narrated speech, so 2 times faster might seem quite slow for their preferred learning speed pace. 

Also, I would like to highlight here that I can't see the video pace buttons, or know how to speed it up on my iPad (Only on my laptop!), so that is kind of frustrating! So, Coursera what are you doing about that?  

YouTube gets it, too! It even allows you to slowdown to 0.25 (though, sound seems to only work from 0.5 and upwards) and increase up to 2 times the original video speed. Though, I would love to be able to increase the video speed further, especially for people with accessibility issues and super learners!

ARTICULATE 

What about Rapid e-Learning tools such as Articulate Presenter, Articulate Storyline, Camtasia and Captivate? Do they empower you to speed up the video pace to your personalized learning speed? Well, Articulate player interfaces don't, and that is a shame. As we at our University (IMU) use Articulate tools a lot, we would like to see such features embedded really soon.

To speed up the process, I tweeted my request right to the Articulate (Super) man...Tom Kuhlmann (and Articulate):

An then I quickly realized, perhaps I should a create a Screenr (screen recording) clarifying visually what I want, so Articulate are perfectly clear what I want. 




TOM RESPONDS WITHIN 8 HOURS!





Tom being Tom, responds within 8 hours: 'I've added it as a feature request :)" (as a comment to the Screenr video).



Thumbs up! That is why Tom Kuhlmann is the RAPID E-LEARNING GUY (in the world)!

WHEN?

Wait a second! Until I can publish Articulate content with learning video speed features, I am not going to celebrate! So, Articulate the waiting period has begun!

Now, it is time for Articulate to show us HOW RAPID THEY CAN BE!



Well, it might take longer than I had initially hoped, because Tom e-mailed me that "the challenge with this type of functionality is that it works well for video, but if the course content is audio synced to other elements it's not easy, especially interactive content."

I am (still) waiting eagerly to speed learn Articulate content at my personalized learning pace :)

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