While video-based learning continues to rank high in the latest trends, there are a few points that are regularly overlooked in the production of learning videos, with a focus on user experience (UX) and user interaction
People really enjoy watching videos. According to a survey conducted among consumers worldwide, respondents watched an average of 19 hours of online video content per week in 2022. And nearly half of all internet users watch online videos at least once a week.
The Challenge of Mandatory Learning
Once we had several mandatory learning courses designed to be passed successfully by all employees. Still, many of them struggled to do so. Reminder emails to all participants could not solve the issue. And that is when my team was summoned to develop a thorough plan to reduce the number of overdue courses to a minimum. Of course, we were asked to develop something fun and engaging.
Uncovering the Root Problems
While working on the project, we managed to uncover several problems with course assignments, including the fact that they were not offered just in time, there were too many of them, and all of them had different due dates, which made it impossible to remember when to complete them. Additionally, we found that the content itself was often dry and unengaging, further contributing to the lack of motivation among employees. Finally, we came up with a system of notifications that included clear explanatory reminder emails, an escalation system, and a redesign of the course content to make it more interactive and relevant to employees' daily work. The result was almost no overdue courses after system integration.
The Myth of Mandatory Fun
So the case first seemed to be about motivation and engagement, but it is actually about smart course design that allows people to worry about work tasks instead of worrying about course assignments. It's also about creating content that resonates with the learners and helps them see the value in the training.
Here is a bit refreshed translation of my 2015 blog post. The post shows how to organize a personal academic library of unlimited size for free. This is a funny case of a self written manual which I came back to multiple times myself and many many more times referred my friends to it, even non-Russian speakers who had to use Google Translator and infer the rest from screenshots. Finally, I decided to translate it adding some basic information on how to use Zotero with rmarkdown.
Bibliographic manager is a life saver in everyday academic life. I suffer almost physical pain just thinking about colleagues who for some reason never started using one — all those excel spreadsheets with favorite citations, messy folders with PDFs, constant hours lost for the joy-killing task of manual reference list formatting. Once you start using a reference manager this all becomes a happily forgotten nightmare.
Most people assume that I studied computer science in university and that I’ve been coding since I was young. They’re usually surprised when I tell them that in fact I studied Marketing and Spanish and that although my brother taught me how to build a very basic web page in the early 2000s, I didn’t really start to learn to program until I was an adult with a job.
The truth of the matter is that my story isn’t unique. It’s simply not true that you have to be a whiz kid who’s been coding since they were 6 years old in order if you want to be able to program as an adult. There are tons of examples of people who also don’t have a technical background who either became full time programmers or just learned a new skill they enjoy using.
In this post, I’ll give you some advice that has served me well on my journey. My path is by no means the only path and depending on the situation you’re in might not be practical or right for you, but it is certainly a path, and I hope it helps you on your path to learning to computer.
“Sometimes it happens that a man’s circle of horizon becomes smaller and smaller, and as the radius approaches zero it concentrates on one point. And then that becomes his point of view.”
David Hilbert
“When I thought I had hit rock bottom, someone knocked from below.”
Stanisław Jerzy Lec
Hi. My name is Michael Kapelko. I've been developing software professionally for more than 10 years. Recent years were dedicated to iOS. I develop games and game development tools in my spare time.
Overview
Today I want to share my experience of teaching kids to program. I'm going to discuss the following topics:
Have you ever thought — How to explain programming to the one never faced it before? It could be a problem, as long a new one will not understand you.
So, let's imagine — you have a friend, who is not soiled by computer science, never tried to automate something, never played factorio, never written a single line of code.
So, let's imagine a normal human being.
And let's call him Bill. He is not very good in Maths, just “not good”, but he loves candies!
Your task is to teach Bill some basic(or magic) IT things, you are doing every day. The simplest ones.
So what shall you do first? Basically — FEED HIM!
