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I know this is my own auto-didactic prejudice, but I see a lot of this screencast stuff and am set back by how much people seem to want to be spoon-fed skills, and by my own disbelief that skill can be acquired that way.
I think you'd be surprised. I learned C and C++ and never looked at the reference (standard) for either until far after I was proficient (with C I learned it a fair bit before a standard existed). I learned by reading Stroustrup, K&R, Lippman, etc... I learned JS by reading Crockford -- and while I've spent a fair bit of time looking at the jQuery reference docs, I don't think I've ever looked at the JS reference docs.
I think a lot of people learn languages/frameworks/tools from reading blogs/books/webpages/videos and not the actual reference docs.
I didn't understand reference docs on Actionscript until well after I had consumed a couple excellent introductory tutorials and browsed tons of forum threads.
When I was approached to record a series of jQuery screencasts for TekPub, I almost passed because I didn't personally see the value of video tutorials. However, having done it and received voluminous amounts of positive feedback from people who finally groked concepts that had been eluding them, I've come to realize that different people simply learn best in different ways. The success of Kahn is another good example of this.
I don't think that makes a video-learner somehow inferior for having approached the topic in a different way. It just means that they best absorb content in a different way than you and me. Often, when I hear from people who watched my videos, they're asking for pointers to more advanced content on the same topic, so they can continue building on that foundation. I think it's inaccurate to cast them as being "spoon-fed" and assume they don't pursue deeper knowledge.
The other edge of the sword, though, is that I do see an ultimate limit to how much you can learn from tuorials, and I know several people who never acquired the skill of finding and learning from first sources, which saddens me.
One of the main features is the ability to track their progress on a public transcript page which people can link to to prove that they've gone through the material.
When I was first learning it (4 years ago), I ran into a lot of trouble.
Python has Python.org and documentation in reams. C++ has cplusplus.com, C# has MSDN, PHP has php.net, and so on.
In comparison, W3 schools seems very poorly laid out and not very structured.
I've always liked:
http://eloquentjavascript.net/
and
Big PDF. It's a bit dense, but unambiguous. Nota most bene, though: not every browser implements everything you'll read in the standard. But, if a higher percentage of JS coders would read and grasp the standard, we'd have less confusion about how to use the langauge, IMO.
Don't trust W3 Schools. Despite its name, it is in no way affiliated with the W3C. Take a look at http://w3fools.com
I wish every online video tutorial worked like that. It goes a long way toward mitigating how unscannable video is for tutorial content.
Love the map and fiddle integration. Can't wait to see what pops up down the line.
We do expect to include micro libraries such as YepNope as we get to them.