I’ve been following the course for weeks and now suddenly the lecture videos are not showing up and it’s just transcript!
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they have been removed because the team didn’t have time to keep them up to date.
Also, our testing and analytics showed that most weren’t interested in the videos. So it wasn’t best to invest valuable resources and time into producing them.
It looks like a lot of the videos are still live on the freeCodeCamp concepts channel though
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People have been asking for copies of the js videos but they are not in that channel. Could someone upload them?
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Yeah, I can ask Beau about doing that 
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that’s such a pity! you should have brought in all the preference into account.
i have adhd and it take me longer time to read the text 
that was not quite compatible with accessibility principles btw! 
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You will need to do a lot of reading to learn and do programming.
you should have brought in all the preference into account.
Trust me we did.
This was not a haphazard decision. This was a decision that spanned several weeks of conversations, testing and analytics that was initially brought up by Quincy himself.
We had to look at all of the variables involved before making a decision.
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I think a library of explanatory images or gif animations could be useful. They would be more flexible and modular than full videos because you can plug them into webpages and modify them more easily.
I’m not sure if something like that already exists or is in the works but I was going to try and develop a few on my own and propose something.
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I don’t think every website that doesn’t include video is “not compatible with accessibility” that’s ridiculous.
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Yeah, there were conversations about that. Going through and seeing which ones we can have images for and add it to the CDN repo.
i have a thought here, which you’ll hopefully forgive me for sharing.
FCC doesn’t collect information about student’s prior learning and so, is it possible that any metrics collected on the viewership of the videos was skewed unfavorably against new learners? (was there a way to tell if the people not watching were the people who had prior coding experience maybe?)
Not asking because I’m hoping to cause any changes in decided upon policies but rather cause I’m curious if that had figured into any calculations.
It is the same content in the transcripts and the videos, right? So experience level shouldn’t really be a factor.
To me it seems like a preference for passive viewing/listening vs active reading ?
A full page of text about a technical topic can be intimidating vs just watching a video (even though the content is the same)
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There has been interesting research suggesting that well presented lectures can be really good at giving a sense of understanding without the actual increase in understanding, so I’m not as worried about educational outcomes one way or another with the videos. The maintenance burden around the videos is definitely a concern and I’m surprised we went with them originally given the high amount of maintenance needed to keep something like that in sync with a curriculum like fCC’s.
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collected on the viewership of the videos
we had other tests and metrics to see if campers preferred videos over text. One of the cool things we have is posthog session replays where we can see actual users going through different parts of challenges. And so that data was really helpful and helped us make some changes to the curriculum like breaking up lecture blocks and adding more projects.
At the end of the day, through all of this testing, analytics and reviews of feedback as well as weighing the maintenance cost, Quincy made the final decision to no longer have videos.
We do understand that people have preferences and some liked the videos. But we had to look the bigger picture and the long term success of the curriculum.
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if you were to ask me if I would like to learn something new by attending a live lecture vs reading the teacher’s notes/slides, I would 100% choose to attend a live lecture.
But if you were to ask the same question about a subject that I have some experience with, I would most definitely choose to skim the notes. (i’d be too bored in the lecture listening to stuff i already know and hoping to still be awake when we get to the parts I don’t)
That’s a preference I guess?
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Yeah, I think Quincy’s original thought was videos wouldn’t require that much maintenance. I think his hope was that we create them once, do reviews and then use them for a long time to come. Or if we had to do updates there would be a quicker turn around. But that was far from reality and maintaining them became a nightmare.
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That makes sense.
I can also understand different learning styles and video just working better for some people.
Does make sense. There must be some topics that are relatively perennial.
That said it can take a few iterations to perfect any of this material and video is a different level of production.
Some codebases and diagrams only appear in the videos — have you thought about that?
Besides, these videos are valuable when I review the lectures, because I’m not completely unfamiliar with the terminology, syntax, and concepts.
Furthermore, people can learn at their own pace by following their unique learning styles.
There are at least four major learning styles relevant to coding:
Visual learning
Auditory learning
Reading and writing
Kinesthetic learning
This is one of the most important parts of the learning process when it comes to coding.