Hacker News Reader

Comment by kesselvon | Hacker News Reader

Yes. The vast majority of the population has no idea how excel works, or have ever had any kind of training in it. I've personally worked with people that would do the formulas by a hand calculator and type the results into the cell.

She makes her classes very accessible and the videos just make it easy to engage with; Excel courses usually don't try to do this.

View on HN

It’s not the usefulness of having Excel tutorials I am questioning, but their form.

Is there really an appeal to having your tutorial (or at least its ad) being someone dancing and lip-syncing over totally unrelated music with the tips being overlaid as text boxes? Is this the “final form” of the tutorial format? I personally don’t find this “accessible” at all, it’s un-engaging/distracting at best and cringe inducing at worst; and I am baffled as to how someone would find this better than a well written book/guide or even a well made screencast type tutorial.

I agree with you. It’s hard to imagine that this is good for learning. If you look at the course preview video it’s not as bad, still very gimmicky and ‘engaging’ though. Maybe this has to do with age - people who grew up with social media might perceive this differently.

The answer, still, is yes. But that was clear, based on the revenue numbers that prompted your question.

It might be more productive to ask "how" you (and I) became so "out of touch" (relatively), and if it's such a bad thing.

You are absolutely correct, and I was trying to imply the “how” in my post. I’m in my thirties, grew up on computers and “social media” (from forums/IRC to Facebook et al.) and never considered myself to be that out of touch. If I had to guess the target audience for these kind of “lessons”, I’d say that they are people in the 25-35 range… not teens. I would have never thought that a 25-35 year old viewer would find any appeal in that kind of format, and that having those TikTok clips as promotional material would work on them.

Foremost, this makes me wonder how education is going to be like in 20+ years when current schoolchildren become teachers and teachers’ teachers. Are all students going to be “home schooled” (online) in periods of 30 seconds to 2 minutes by some teacher lip syncing and dancing to the latest pop hit?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com