This blog post is in response to the prompt “What is one idea from the readings or videos that you disagree with, and why?“
The ideas presented in Chapter 11 of Foundations of Learning and Instructional Design Technology and the various videos provided in the first unit of the course were familiar, yet refreshing.
One idea that stood out to me was in Veritasium’s video: Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos. In the video, Veritasium states that the method that Sal Khan uses in his videos, explaining scientific ideas through the use of concise and clear diagrams and explanations, is not as effective as one would initially think. The argument is because students already have some understanding of the topic, they are likely to assume that the content taught in the video is no different from their understanding and lose focus – even if the pre-existing knowledge is wrong. As an alternative, Veritasium suggests the educator explain the topic from the students’ perspective: by repeating common misconceptions and explaining why such a method is incorrect.
While this idea is true for some topics, it’s not an idea that I generally agree with. I think the method of repeating common mistakes and showing the correct method is effective for topics that the audience is very familiar with – such as simple computation or direction of gravitational forces.
For topics where the audience has been exposed to several times already,
it is true that simple instructional videos be difficult to keep the audience focused on. However, for topics that the audience is less familiar with, the method of concisely explaining the correct method will be more effective than the method of repeating common mistakes and correcting the mistake. Since the audience does not have much pre-existing understanding of the topic in the first place, the audience will have just as much motivation to learn on either of the two methods. And since the former method is more concise, I think it will lead to better learning outcomes.
As a long-time audience of Khan Academy, I’ve found the format of Khan Academy videos to be effective at learning topics that I was not familiar with, and this is why I believe the method used by Sal Khan is the ideal teaching method.
Community Contribution
This week, I reviewed posts by Josef Waller
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